Pros
Decent colleagues. Good professionals. You can learn a lot from their experience. N.B. This DOES NOT include the Directors of the company. No other Pros.
Cons
The management publishes fake overrated Glassdoor reviews for certain positions in their own company. This violates the terms and conditions as follows: "You agree that you will not: 1. Impersonate another person, or his or her email address, or misrepresent your current or former affiliation with an employer. 2. Create user accounts under false or fraudulent pretences; create or use an account for anyone other than yourself; or create multiple active user accounts to post multiple reviews for the same company." You will sign a contract for 37.5 hours per week - on average you will do >60: The place never closes. It runs 24/7. At least the mechanical engineering team. You will be intimidated personally by the upper management to work every weekend, every bank holiday, every working day after 5PM, every working day before 9AM. This happens on regular basis and of course all overtime is not paid. Why would it be? There is no logical reason for that. After several months you will not simply feel tiered - you will be exhausted physically, mentally and you will feel sick just from the thought of going to this place and breathing the air among these people. Problematic management: The upper management of the company pretends that there is an external adviser called "The Professor" who lives in Australia. Every single engineering decision goes through that imaginary person. You are not allowed to question his/her authority. You need to take their words for granted. Therefore a number of unforgivable mistakes are made on regular basis. Engineers do not engineer products they obey orders. If you do not obey you are punished severely with extra work, payment deductions, rude attitude etc. You cannot argue with "The Professor" if you do so and you are correct, he/she will not answer to you. In fact he/she will make on of his/her imaginary students to answer to your claims. Do not expect to receive extensive, well documented reviews of your work. You will most probably get a rude attitude with a lot of exclamation marks and dubious reasoning. Your personal life does not matter: If you are less than 70 years old and you have no wife, no kids, no grandchildren, no family, no friends and no social interaction - then this is perfect workplace for you! Unfortunately if you do have any of the aforementioned privileges you will be forced to make compromises. Outdated computer system: From my personal experience you will be asked to run professional software on 10 year old 'workstation' computers. Although the directors have latest model top of the line workstation laptops and convertible ultrabooks, you will perform simulations and general SolidWorks tasks with 8GB RAM, Entry level quad core Xeon manufactured in 2007, lowest spec nVidia Kepler architecture GPU with 512Mb VRAM manufactured in 2012. This often is lower than the minimum spec required to run SolidWorks. The workstations crash 3-4 times a day and require hard reset. You will be refused access to software tools: Only the upper management has full access to FEA tools even if they are not directly involved with the Engineering department. The mechanical engineers DO NOT have access to the tools required to do their job. You will be asked to perform complex numerical computation by hand because 'There is a simple equation for every problem'. Albeit true to some extend... designing multiple shock and vibration fixtures, deriving the stiffness of PCB assembly, deriving the propagation of heat flux through complex objects, deriving the dissipation of heat through forced air convection from the fins of a heat sink by hand is not the most straightforward task in the world. In fact it is next to impossible to get reasonable results. As a matter of fact in the rare occasions when you will have access to simulation tools, the results will be rejected by the "The Professor" and he/she as explained previously will ask one of their apprentices to "answer" to you. Designs progress slowly. Very slowly indeed. Simple heat sinks for products sometimes take up to 1 calendar year until they are completed. Most of these tasks are forgotten if they are not currently needed and then out of the blue sky all the work needs to be completed in unrealistic time frame such as 2 days/nights for a project that normally would take 1.5-2 weeks. There is no project planning. Your priorities will be changed on daily basis. From personal experience your workload can change up to 7 times a day. You simply cannot plan 2 days ahead. Outdated software: Up until recently the company used SolidWorks 2012 although they are fully entitled to 2017. After months of struggling we finally updated to 2014. Double standards: Your nationality and ethnic origin is extremely important to the management. If you happen to be on the unfortunate side only God can help you. Word gets around quickly: Do not speak and do not share anything. Even the walls "listen" in this office. You will be surprised how quickly a rumor will spread to everyone in the building. It is like plague. The hierarchy is not very well defined. The mechanical engineers do not have senior staff such as Principle Mechanical Engineer / Manager above them. Instead they report directly to the directors. Capable employees do not hang around for too long. I have personally seen 12 entry level, 5 mid level and 3 senior level employees to disappear. Bear in mind that the UK office in only about 70 employees in total. It is a "not written" company policy to hire primarily entry level staff. Simply because they have less experience and they can be easily shaped to fit the needs of the directors. Most importantly they are paid a lot less than senior staff.