Pros
-Free breakfast (usually a bun or bagel) every morning. 2 fruits to pick from every Wednesday. -Great benefits, 100% coverage for every employee but of course additional payment if you add on other people to the plan. -Great place to start right after college or even to gain some hands-on experience working with servers. -This is a fast growing company so job stability is good. From what I know there hasn't been any lay offs since and only time they let you go is if you really do something bad. You will notice majority of the workers whose been working here for over 6 years are usually older of age. Young people usually come and go within a year or so. -In general, the people in the RMA Testing department are GREAT and helpful team-players. Depending on which testing department you're apart of (a total of 4 groups total) you're either going to enjoy it or dread it depending on the lead (supervisor). -Richard's group is probably described as the extrovert group. Everyone in this group are very helpful, talkative, and full of life. If you have any questions, they got your back 100%. -Wally's group is the introvert group. Everyone mind their own business, work and go home. You probably get trained by one person for about a month or so then after that you're on your own and you're expected to excel after that. -Ron's group is similar to Wally's but except the employees here repair more than testing on motherboards and add-on parts. -Jason's testing group has only two people who he supervises. Not much to say about his group.
Kontras
-Pay isn't competitive compared to other similar companies out there in the market. -Not really a con but RMA department will offer no over-time. I don't mind it since it's a good work/life balance for me. -No growth potential, no promotions or moving up in the RMA department. You are stuck with that position unless you transfer to another department. All the leads and manager have been working here for many many years and throwing in all their chips to retire. -Raises is usually 6% of your current pay rate. I've heard from veteran workers (10 years+) that some years you don't get any. I noticed a high turn-over rate in terms of people quitting because of this. If you decide to quit, no problem you're easily replaced with someone else in line for the job. -Lack of accountability. I noticed that leads/managers never apologize for the mistakes that they make and hardly any "thank you's" received. Also, more criticism than positive feedbacks. I'm not sure if this is a common practice here at SMC or not but that's not how I would run my business. Motivation is important by verbally telling us "keep up the good work" or "hey, good job". Instead, you will hear a lot of, "our department is the slowest so please work faster and harder". I know our department isn't the slowest, trust me..I actually looked into the database and counted the daily reports and compared the numbers to other testing departments. It's just a ploy to work us harder to get their moneys worth. -As mentioned above, make sure you create some sort of a tracking list (preferably excel sheet) of all the new replacement parts given to you by the leads. They don't keep track and there were 6 occasions where I never received the new parts but got accused. In the end, all 6 parts were found behind his desk but were there any direct apologizes to me? You guessed it...none. These situation could be awkward and embarrassing for both people so avoid this by tracking everything. -Also, take pictures of everything before shipping it back to customer. Two cases where customer claim to have missing parts but luckily for me I save all checklists and back-up pictures as proof. -The two leads (Wally & Richard) are great. They do their jobs accordingly, follow every rule in the book, and support the techs if help is needed. I can't speak for the other leads and manager since I don't work around them. But what I notice they ALL have in common is lack of smiling and this sense of seriousness. Not sure if it's by consequence that they all share the same personality or if it's by design to deploy fear to the workers to earn respect. -Lastly, lack of diversity in terms of Ethnicity. This company is (my guess) about 90% Asians consist mainly with Taiwanese and Chinese and mostly whites in the Field Sales. I hope one day SMC will open the doors for other individuals as well.