Pros

John East, CEO, is very approachable and knows all employees by name. Respect for management and employees. Competitive pay, Management encourages work life balance. Great work location and a fabulous gym. Awesome college internship program.

Cons

Average career advancement. Technology not very exciting. Hit hard by recent economic downturn.

Advice to Senior Management

Have stronger vision.

Pros

Over the people at the company are pretty competent. Flexible managers, relatively good benefits. Small company, which means you need to interact with people from a variety of different departments, giving you the opportunity to learn a lot of things.

Cons

Work can get repetitive. Products don't seem to be going anywhere, and the company doesn't seem to be doing that well financially.

Advice to Senior Management

Company needs a new direction. Going "green" doesn't really work when the products you are producing aren't competitive on speed or features.

Pros

There is appreciation for good work. In general opportunities are provided to grow with good support from manager. Salary is decent. Sabbatical break is nice. They are usually understanding of personal time offs.

Cons

Benefits are ok, not the best. There is internal politics in certain areas (favoritism?). The company has low probability of quick growth, mainly due to the type of markets served.

Advice to Senior Management

~ Too many re-orgs (starting even before the slow down). This results in employees to stop caring about organizational structure at all. Please try to keep some formation intact.
~ Staffing not in line with number of products

Pros

Very understanding and flexible about time off for personal reasons.

Cons

Business Areas do not take impacts to other business areas into account when creating new processes. Manual work arounds are common. Many cause problems in other business areas. Systems to support these processes are therefore jury-rigged and difficult to modify (or even understand in some cases). No one has the big picture from a systems perspective and IT, while expected to have a big picture, is considered a drag on any project, so is never told enough info to get the big picture. IT is also hampered by severe resource constraints.

Finally, in recent years there have been so many mandatory shut downs (take vacation or no pay) that it is impossible for a new employee to accrue time off. Also, they do not match 401K.

Advice to Senior Management

Give IT enough resources to be effective, and re-enforce support for IT by discouraging non-IT projects that impact multiple business areas. Encourage business areas to work with other areas PRIOR to business process changes and each area should step up to own thier own business data and how the systems they use represent that data and the associated business processes. NOTE: Enough IT resources means to have at minimum 2 resources(primary and backup) for each production system.

Pros

Nice shutdown time at holidays. Good pay.

Cons

TOO MUCH HR INVOLVEMENT. They are everywhere and don't treat people well

Advice to Senior Management

Cut back on the HR presence. It's intimidating and people DO NOT LIKE IT. Nobody will tell you that but they do not like it! Be fair to the people who are loyal to you.

Pros

The company is fairly stable. Flexible working hours. 1.5 - 2 weeks shutdown around Christmas holidays is convenient

Cons

Sometimes the company shuts down during summer- this forces using vacation hours at a certain set time (reduces flexibility of vacation)

Advice to Senior Management

Too many products and product lines- should reduce products and increase focus.