Pratt & Whitney Reviews

Pros

Good pay, smart people, interesting products and challenges.

Cons

Very conservative organization. Lots of levels of approval for anything.

Pros

Great company, Wonderful people, Big on strategic planning

Cons

Lack of innovation, focus on long term

Advice to Senior Management

Work on building carer paths

Pros

Employee scholarship program 100% tuition assistance and books

Cons

pay is by far not great

Pros

1. OK benefits
2. Vacation and plan shutdown days

Cons

1. Very basic IT department. Even managers are programmers
2. Difficult employees

Advice to Senior Management

IT needs testers, PMs, Business Analysts and not just programmers

Pros

Good name, opportunities in aerospace industry

Cons

compensation is at most fair

Pros

Two of the best reasons to work at Pratt & Whitney are the great safety record and opportunities given for personal/professional growth

Cons

The stringent work timings might be unappealing to some people as well as the protocols can be seen as rather rigid.

Advice to Senior Management

None

Pros

Health Insurance
Vacation days
December plant shutdown

Cons

Furlough Days
Incompetent CEO
Old Boys Club
Rude employees

Advice to Senior Management

Stop working your employees to the point of having nervous breakdowns. I've seen three colleagues carted out in stretchers.

Pros

- Decent tuition reimbursement program after 1 year of continuous service
- UTC will pay for the cost of your first bachelor, first master's degree (cap amount applies)
- Fellow engineers are nice and cooperative
- No cut-throat competition among employees
- Paid sick-time off, 1 week starting
- Good place for "Powerpoint-style Engineers" to shine
- Peers do get to contribute to your performance review (final say is still in your boss's hands though)

Cons

- Employees do not feel that they are "valued", less than 60%
- Pay is not all that competitive
- No overtime pay what so ever even though you highly undermanned
- Lack of support from immediate and upper management
- Upper management completely disconnected with employees (they sit in ivory tower)
- Promotion is based on largely on tenure, not contributions to the company
- If you work there long enough (like 15-25) years, you would be guaranteed a management position
- Excessive outsourcing, exceeding 100% for certain programs
- Forced to outsourced to firms that continual deliver poor quality work
- Over-reliance on outsourcing to IAS-Puerto Rico (low skilled degreed engineers)
- Old-schooled management style
- Upper management treat human talent as machines with on/off button
- Management does not know how to develop internal talent (new people are put in float or down test)
- No free coffee.
- Design review is a joke, focusing too much on project management and too little on crude engineering
- Military style of operation. You have job-grade levels as well as discipline-specific proficiency/knowledge level. Do we really need another degree of freedom?

Advice to Senior Management

- Don't think you know how to effectively manage people by reading a few management books
- Get formal education/training in managing people
- People are people, not machines so don't treat people like machines
- Even machines break down due to abuse and neglect
- Fire people who are not competent for their job duties
- Stop outsourcing; you are only sending core knowledge outside the company
- Outsourcing to incompetent firms only costs you money, not save
- Update your computer offerings. 64bit is always something of the past so don't brag about deploying 64 bit systems in the coming year.
- Hire some young professionals for lower level management positions. Age does not translate to good management potential.

Pros

Professional atmosphere. There are many systems to work on.

Cons

Too big, too bureaucratic. Too many disjointed systems have grown up like weeds.

Advice to Senior Management

not sure there is anything that can fix this ship

Pros

World class high tech products to work on.

Cons

The company has become so focused on standardized procedures to do virtuallu all engineering. This has made even simple tasks take forever to complete, and also saps creative and innovative thinking. Engineers are becoming process driven robots that will complete engineering tasks by following a bewildering series of steps and documentation so numerous, that often they loose site of the more important aspects of the design. The result is often a poor design, when the process is supposed to be so thorough that mistakes are never made. Outsourcing is another mess because they rely too much on it. This leaves their own engineers acting as baby sitters to the outsource help, thereby eroding their own technical skills to do the jobs themselves. Workload and expected "casual overtime"? Do even get me started.

Advice to Senior Management

Wake up! You have taken this too far. Give employees the ability to think for themselves and get the job done quicker. You are fast becoming too inefficient to do any new large engineering programs because the process is so convoluted. Hire, compensate, and retain a right sized staff of good engineers and give them the lattitude to get their work done. Limit outsourcing to no more than 20% per department.