Eaton Reviews in Raleigh-Durham, NC Area

Pros

Honest and fair upper management. Work / Life balance is good. Benefits are good. Location is close by and easy to get to. Able to work from home as needed.

Cons

Continuing education could be better. No org charts and constant changes make it difficult to know who to contact at times.

Advice to Senior Management

It would be helpful to have org charts that could be accessed easily. Make products easier for employees to buy.

Pros

Good entry point into electrical industry
Interesting challenges
Good peer atmosphere

Cons

Lack of leadership at senior levels
Sub-par support functions
Lack of interest in developing people

Advice to Senior Management

Eaton is a company with outdated practices and lack of investment in both development of people and support functions for engineering and marketing.
It is a good place to learn the business and gain industry and technical knowledge...but do not expect any sort of career progression if you do not get promoted within the first 2-3 years, it is not a meritocracy in any way, shape, or form.
 It is part of the culture and acceptable as long as you determine what you want early on and have options.
Management should be aware, qualified engineers and marketers in some of the fields Eaton competes are scarce, especially if it takes years to learn the business and technical practices, but treat employees as expendable.

Pros

Pension is about it and you can call in sick as many days as you like, if you are that type of employee.

Cons

Have employees that take 20-50 day's off per year for being sick, or so they claim.
Work with people that are not experienced or professional.
Upper Management in Raleigh is old boy's network and don't understand sales.
Some employees milk the system and take 3 hour lunches, are full of excuses, and their manager protects them.
There are certain Manager's there who don't like conflict and have no backbone when it comes to addressing under-performing employees.
Preach ethics, but employees sametime each other all kinds of thing's which are not ethical.
They fire good employees who do their job for unfair reasons and keep those that don't even work.

Advice to Senior Management

What Management?

Pros

Culture, Pay, Ease of job

Cons

Politics, Racism, Low Pay, Lack of Knowledge Sharing

Advice to Senior Management

Open your eyes!

Pros

- Good career advancement opportunities
- Development and training available to support your work
- Large company with organisation to support you and development
- Process of everything if you are into such things- very organised business processed

Cons

- very small compensation versus similar job in other companies
- benefits non-existing
- performance reviews tend to driven by criticism and no-explanitions to bad review
- connections who you know seam to matter a lot - merits are not valued or they are ignored

Advice to Senior Management

- if you want to survive your attitude towards employes and collegues must change
- for a young talent I recommend to start your career in a more dynamic and ethical company
- improve you ethics: HR process is there but in practice lots of missuse of process against employees.

Pros

Lots of opportunities to move around to various locations, and climb the management ladder if you're into that sort of thing. It's also a very stable company, so job security is great.

Cons

Being a huge company means they move at a snail's pace, and there's tons of bureaucracy an inefficiency when dealing with anyone outside of your local division. Also, advancing your career basically *requires* you to move around often and "politic" your way upward.

More specifically to engineering, Eaton tries to run its engineering and development offices like it runs the manufacturing side of the business. So the technology tends to lag the real world by a pretty good margin, there are a lot of business processes that simply don't fit the development of non-assembly-line work, and creativity & innovation aren't valued nearly as much as meeting deadlines and keeping existing customers with minor one-off updates to decades-old technology.

Advice to Senior Management

I'd suggest that they hire people knowledgeable in the particular fields of development that are being undertaken, and STOP trying to run the whole company as though Eaton's traditional "truck parts" and "electrical breakers" business models are necessarily a fit for everything else. If they want to truly "diversify" beyond their traditional businesses, it's going to come at a price of giving up some of their "one size fits all" approaches.

Pros

The best reasons for working at Eaton has to be the large network of support. There's pretty much a process in place for everything so people have a chance to get training in a variety of areas related to their work. The company is pretty stable and they do celebrate successes. The goals and feedback system is well defined and setting the goals in line with upper management is well understood. Plenty of networking opportunities and communication about the other lines of business are clear as well. The company is driven by metrics which means that a lot of success has to be concrete which eliminates a lot of subjective judgments that managers quite often mess up.

Cons

The downside is that the work is not all that interesting. There is more focus on cost cutting, process improvements and backward compatibility rather than advancing the technology through new innovations. There is of course new innovations but quite often products are based on old reference designs with lots of restrictions. This often removes the "fun" out of the engineering as we are marching our work toward a cost goal rather than a innovation goal. Another issue with working there is that because the company is so metric driven they quite often treat workers as assets rather than real people.

Advice to Senior Management

Senior Management does not understand that a culture cannot be cultivated strictly through achieving a certain score or metric but through building an organization through the people. The focus on results have produced a company which is strong financially but rather impersonal in dealing with its workers. Since everything is done through a process senior management needs to understand its workers better and adapt to changes especially when acquiring other companies.