Pros
The pay is better at Medtronic than majority of other corporate companies, benefits are good like pension (basic 401k though). The products are important (but also the people that make the decisions would easily put cost savings ahead of Quality....despite the motto being "Quality Begins with me."
Cons
THE PEOPLE!!! At the North Haven corporate area there are almost too many people who have worked there since the US Surgical days 15+ years ago & still treat everything at the pace of 2005. You will be treated as JUST a number. Team comradery in just about all groups out of the Lab Services is extremely low. Basically anybody part of a real Core Team project is miserable in their group b/c directors will treat you only like a number. Everything runs SO SO SO SLOW!!! They like to minimize cost by going to Contract Manufacturer's but the projects take 6 months longer than it should take. Absolutely no chance at Work-Life Balance. You enter the building miserable & you leave the building miserable. What got me to move to this company was the company slogan. Within 4 months I realized the slogan "Quality Begins With Me" is ONLY for the public & the shareholders...and the quarterly Town Halls. You work on a core-team project & if they could cut as many corners as possible they would do it. It is ALWAYS the QE on the project that has to tell the Project Manager that this isn't how it works. The directors don't fully understand how dysfunctional their own team is because they are traveling a quarter the time, getting 10 weeks of vacation a year, or working from home another 1/4 of the time. Personally don't think anybody that is working on validation type projects would want to start working here in the next 9 months with the regulations happening. The company is so stuck in their old ways of the only goal is to manufacture as much as possible that they fail to realize if they don't build these validation lots for regulatory then the product line could be forced to stop running. We get these "backorder" data showing how much there is but they refuse to just stop production for a day for sellable product to move to the one shift that would cover all the validations for the Stability, Sterilization, Packaging, & Biocomp teams.