Very nice pace to work - Student Worker Controllink Employee Review

Work-life balance, culture, emerging technologies

There are no cons here

Not many or any benefits of working for such a small, inconsequential, and poorly managed company.

Controllink is a tiny system integrator with a small control panel shop, a 2-person design team, and a few controls engineers. The founder is close to retirement, and the other co-owner is the founder and CEO of an electrical contractor, Dynamic Electric, who has hired at least 4 of their sons into undeserved leadership positions at both Dynamic Electric and ControlLink. Both of the executive leadership are part-time presences at the main office, and despite the leadership structure being flat, spend little to no time at all communicating, mentoring, or working with their controls engineers in the field. The sales executive brings in staggeringly little original work, thanks to a legacy of a few large customers, and all design work is bottlenecked by a single design executive that has pushed out every other Design and Electrical engineer in the past 26 years. In my role, I was immediately deceived there would be little travel, but the CEO defines "travel" as anything that requires an overnight stay near a customer site. Therefore, I found myself driving over an hour every day to some customer site to produce immediately billable work instead of being onboarded and retooling at the main office. Moreover, I hardly ever heard from senior management, unless I first reached out. Even initiating, I would be ignored and blown off for weeks at a time. It's clear that leadership is all but absent and is not involved involved in the day-to-day as they should, if they indeed want to keep the org chart flat. Between low-quality schematics, poor communication between departments, and the privileged positions the co-owner's son holds in both his companies, this really isn't a place to be working to grow a career, let alone develop skills and do meaningful work. I was hired into a technical role, but months in, all I'm doing is borderline custodial work, thanks to being completely abandoned by the hiring leadership and being shelved at a customer site far from the main office.