Pros
Everyone I work with is always happy to help, and always gets their work done. Management is very approachable with any comments, concerns, or mishaps. Mistakes happen and they understand that. Retention is extremely high and there is a good reason for it! The work environment is incredible. I love the majority of work I do and I am frequently being mentally challenged. Being on the same task every day would be dreadful, but I rarely run into that problem. If you are or will be a Co-op at the company your odds of getting an engineering position (Testing or Software) greatly improve. The schedule is incredibly flexible. I can come in every day between 7-9:30AM and leave around 8 hours after that without any approval. Some days I work a little more than 8 hours, some days I work less, as long as I am getting 40 hours and am attending all the meetings I need to, it is a non issue. If I need to take a half day, but don't want to use time off I can simply ask management little bit in advance and as long as there are no conflicts with my duties on that day and I make up the hours other days there are no issues. Working from home is an option when the work you are doing does not require you to be in person. This is less frequent for my position because testing usually requires a lot of hands on input, but has been very beneficial the few times I have used this option. Co-ops are given real jobs to work on that have a real impact on the company and our products. It is not trivial busy work. From what I have seen generally they try their best to promote from within.
Cons
There is a ton of tribal knowledge that only employees who have worked for a long time have, and it can be frustrating to run into a problem or issue that you have no way of knowing the solution to. A few of the tests are dreadful to run and feel like a 10 year old could do, but the results must be accurate and are critical for progress to be made, so they need to be run by the test engineers. Very few job openings occur in the engineering department. If you are looking for an engineering position(Testing or Software) and you never had a co-op at Codonics it becomes much more difficult (but by no means impossible) to get a position. The things we have to work with can be very old, slow and frustrating to work with. Time can be crunched and that makes it difficult to keep things clean and up to date. Cleaning/dusting happens infrequently to put it lightly.
