Nummi – “Trust me on this one - you don't want to be here.”

Pros

NUMMI's saving grace is its overtime pay. As an engineer, you will be paid time-and-a-half for all overtime you work over forty hours a week. This is only fair, however, as you will have no control over how many hours you work per week. As it is a manufacturing environment, you will need to support the line whenever there is a problem (of which there are many) and the hours will pile up quickly. You will be constantly tired and stressed, but at the end of the two week period, your paycheck will be awesome. Some people think this trade off is worth it. I strongly suggest to you that it is not.

Cons

You will quickly discover that there is no balance between your work life and your personal life. You will very rarely be able to control what time you leave work. You will build up vacation time but you will need to plan months in advance to use it. There will be weeks where you will come home and you will have only an hour or two before you need to go to sleep so you can repeat the cycle the next day. If you are young and single, you can deal with this but expect to be tired and drained after a few days. You will be amazed at how the senior workers manage to keep their marriages intact.

You may think that you signed on as an engineer, but after several weeks it became clear that having a college degree in engineering is not necessary at all to perform the job function. You will never touch anything technical. You will not design anything. Maybe this is OK with you - that's fine. Just fair warning.

You will run into problems, and you will develop clever ways to solve them. However, you will soon find that your hands are tied by many different factors. Between the assembly department, the union, and parent company's policies, you will find it very difficult to actually put any changes into motion.

You will always be stressed out. These automobiles are coming off the line at a very fast pace, so if there is a problem, it has to be fixed right away. Of course, you will find that problems do not occur one at a time. You will spend a lot of time dealing with vendors, many of them with limited technical expertise and professionalism, and you are completely dependent on them to help fix these problems. More often than not, they will let you down. You will try to meet impossible deadlines. You will fail.

You will become very familiar with calling your significant other and telling them that, no, you won't be able to make your dinner date because, yes, so-and-so has a problem on the line installing some random part and that you will need to stay until a temporary countermeasure is determined. You will slowly become used to the disappointment in their voice.

You will spend an incredible amount of time working on a performance review. You will be judged on factors that you have no control over, such as JD Power and Consumer Report rankings. You will hear talk of how the entire department is graded on a bell curve. You will work your ass off to find out that you are smack dab on the middle of the curve. You will be lucky to find someone who isn't. You will spend a very long time waiting for a promotion. If you manage to obtain the fabled top rankings, you would hopefully be looking at only a few years. You won't get that.

You will notice the severe lack of morale in the company. You will become familiar with City Beach, where many of the young employees go like clockwork every Friday to drink and whine about work.

You will receive lucrative paychecks from all the overtime you are putting in.

You may get used to the money, until several years down the road, you realize that any switch to a new engineering firm would result in a serious pay cut.

You will most likely find out that even if you wanted to, you wouldn't be able to jump ship, as your years of work lacking technical duties have lagged you behind your colleagues.

You, like many others before you, may be trapped.

Advice to Senior Management

Please pay attention to the high turnover rate. There is something iunmistakably wrong, and it needs to be corrected.