Pros
There are great people and good cross-functional teamwork, but not through culture or training, just through relationship power. Due to the flat organizational structure, role power only works against you, from the top down. Expertise power is unreliable due to poor communication and those treated as subject matter experts being overloaded with work. I would like to say that everyone is trying their best, but it's clear from a department management angle they're not. If the goal for CTS going forward is to continue being an agile organization, they need to shed the weight of disorganization, standardize their design practices and retain their employees by treating them like they are the professionals you hired them to be. Perspective applicants: If you’re early in your engineering career, CTS is a great place to pick up a LOT of good experience in a short amount of time. Just don’t expect to receive any salary increases or bonuses for several years. Plan on moving on in a few years once it's clear you've plateaued. I also recommend bringing up this glassdoor review in your interview.
Cons
The CTS custom engineering group is meant to be an agile department that can create custom machines that use the company's flagship instruments no matter the application. Unfortunately, somewhere in the process of growing in size, this agility has devolved into a garage mentality. Designing, building, and shipping machines as quickly as possible, without a backbone of an organized and properly structured engineering department has proven CTS is voluntarily neglecting the internal development that most companies learn they need and overcome as "growing pains" as they, as small company, grow into a larger company. This "garage mentality" has permeated through every layer of the company and has created almost all of the myriad of issues that hold it back from growing. One of the major missing pieces in the department is the lack of hierarchy. The flat organizational structure provides no opportunity to advance in role or seniority. The only possible move is to Business Segment Manager and these positions are not always filled with the most qualified people for the job, leaving entire teams with absentee managers. Without literally talking to all your co-workers, there is no way to know who has been with the company longest or who to go to for technical advice. A major symptom of this is there are no documented engineering standards, no design reviews and everything learned is due to trial and error. Newer engineers, especially those fresh out of college or co-ops are left to their own devices and inevitably make mistakes. Onboarding consists of an hour or two of training on the flagship instrument with little context or support from your manager or co-workers. From there, the entirety of your company training is left to the last new person who you are dumped onto to shadow. You'd better be good at learning on your feet. Although it won't be in your offer letter, and may not even stated in your interview, a 45-hour work week is expected. You will not be paid for these extra hours. When the department is busy enough though, you might receive straight pay after the 45 or 50-hour mark. The higher-ups only care that you’re putting in a certain number of hours a week, so working harder, smarter or being efficient with your time actually works against you. The term "Flex" schedule has been tossed around, but understand that this is not a true flex schedule. You will be encouraged to use PTO on every occasion in which you need to take time away from the office. Post pandemic, one would assume that a work-from-home policy would be proven effective and readily available for employees, especially engineers in the design portion of their project schedule. The corporate work-from-home policy that is included in the employee handbook states with permission from your supervisor, a work-from-home arrangement can be made. Even with this policy and getting explicit permission from your supervisor, working from home will be held against you while being given the reason, "We don't want people taking advantage" of the policy. There are no performance reviews, formal or informal and due to this, there are no annual raises or cost of living increases. The general company benefits are good but pretty standard for an engineering firm. Employee quality is based on hours logged, not efficiency or project hours saved. Because everything is informal, it keeps the employee on their back foot. On the rare occasion in which bonuses are awarded, the requirements to be eligible can be changed at the whim of the leadership. Recently, they were based on overtime hours and travel. If you weren't assigned projects that required either, or you work efficiently enough to not need overtime you're SOL. Engineering leadership can be summed up by their titles. They are called Business Segment Managers, not Engineering Team Leaders or Supervisors. BSMs don't manage the people under them, they manage the project managers, who become de facto supervisors for the people assigned to their projects. Feedback and complaints fall on the deaf ears of the director even if the BSMs are open to your concerns.