Avoid if you have self-respect - Junior Hardware Engineer General Micro Systems Employee Review

COMPENSATION Considering this is a tech company, the compensation is very poor. Not only is your salary significantly lower than what engineers would expect to make anywhere else, but the annual performance-based bonuses/raises you get are also very low. I was only there long enough to receive one performance review, which they delayed for several months past when I was supposed to receive it. When I finally did receive my performance review, my supervisor informed me that I greatly exceeded expectations and they were very impressed with me, so they decided to give me one of the biggest raises in the company that year... which only ended up being 3.5%. And to my memory, I didn't receive any bonus, just the raise, despite the fact that I had supposedly so greatly exceeded expectations. I've even heard from someone else who had been working there for much longer that there was one year in which they didn't give out any bonuses or raises at all. Instead, the receptionist called all the employees to the break room and gave out candy to each of them, calling that their end-of-year bonus. I don't know how long ago this happened, but I find it quite insulting that General Micro Systems would think to treat their employees in such a patronizing way. WORK-LIFE BALANCE My supervisor, as well as several other managers, have no appreciation for work-life balance. I would see many of my coworkers being manipulated or intimidated into working late into the nights, and sometimes even working on weekends, without getting any sort of additional compensation for working overtime. My supervisor probably worked around 80 hours a week by my estimate (not an exaggeration), and seemed to expect his employees to be willing to put in that amount of work too. THE WORK ITSELF This section won't really be relevant to anyone who's not looking for a hardware engineering job, but I'd like to talk about my experience of the actual work itself. I found 99% of what I did to be very mundane. As a hardware engineer, I was expecting to have to come up with creative solutions to difficult problems, performing calculations to optimize my circuit designs. However, the vast majority of what I actually ended up doing was much more boring than any of that. Whenever I was tasked with "designing a circuit", I was told to just copy over designs from a datasheet's reference schematic into our locally-used schematics entry software (named DxDesigner, more on that later...). This was just tedious and not enjoyable at all. I expect that every job has its tedious bits such as this, but it seemed like this job was constantly tedious, and I was never able to do something that I really enjoyed. I mentioned earlier that we used a piece of schematics entry software called DxDesigner. This software was very buggy and difficult to use, compounding the problem of the work being tedious. It had very non-intuitive controls, and there was no easy way to automatically perform some operations that you needed to do repeatedly. On rare occasions, the software would crash and cause you to lose a whole bunch of data. And the worst part was, there was a bug (which I experienced frequently) that caused the "Undo" operation to not work sometimes, which was very problematic because DxDesigner made it very easy to inadvertently do something that you didn't mean to do. Altium and OrCAD are widely regarded as superior alternatives to DxDesigner, so I don't know why management forced us to use this product. I remember one of my coworkers once tried to convince our manager to let us switch over to Altium, and got a few of us involved in trying to persuade him, but we were unsuccessful and still forced to use DxDesigner. Lastly, and this goes for everyone, not just engineers: there is an awful lot of bureaucracy at General Micro Systems, especially given its size. It can take a long amount of time to do something that should be simple, because you have to jump through these weird hoops and talk to a bunch of different managers COMPANY CULTURE This is what I want to discuss in the review more than anything else. The company is an absolutely miserable place to work. I mentioned earlier that your coworkers are generally pretty amicable, and I still stand by that statement. However, management is, with few exceptions, absolutely awful, and very unpleasant to work with. I touched on this a bit when I talked about work-life balance, but it goes much deeper than that. Most managers will expect nothing short of perfection from their employees and will berate them if they fail to meet those expectations. What makes this particularly bad is that these same managers will often fail to properly communicate what they want, or how they want it done. So you may think that you did a good job, only to find yourself getting berated because your manager wanted something more than what he communicated. Moreover, the managers don't communicate amongst each other very often either (when they do, you'll hear a lot of angry shouting). Therefore, sometimes managers will have conflicting ideas about how something should be done, so you may find that you've appeased your manager only to get berated by a different manager. However, I think that the reason why the managers are so unpleasant is because they have to interface with the CEO frequently. If the managers are bad, the CEO is much, much worse. The CEO has severe anger management problems. I was fortunate to avoid interacting with him very much, but I have overheard him going on lengthy tirades at certain employees and even cussing them out, for minor things that he didn't like (sometimes, they were things that these employees had no way of knowing he would be upset about). Here are some stories I've heard about the CEO from people who worked at the company longer than I had: The CEO would occasionally go on a rampage through the lab, ranting loudly (including swearing) about something he was upset about. During this rampage, he would pick up lab technicians' boards that they were working on and throw them in the trash to make a point. These technicians would then have to go and dig their boards out of the trash afterwards (these boards can cost upwards of $10,000). When one of my coworkers was still a relatively new employee, the CEO came and talked to him for the first time while he was at his desk working on a project. The CEO began grilling him about the project, and asked him if a certain design that my coworker had incorporated would work properly. My coworker informed him that it would work properly, and explained his reasoning. The CEO then proceeded to ask my coworker if he was confident about that. My coworker replied that he was. Then, the CEO replied angrily, "Well, you don't look confident!" and berated my coworker about the importance of being confident. A mechanical engineer presented her prototype of a mechanical part for a system to several other people working on this system. The CEO happened to be at this presentation as well. While the other engineers and managers seemed satisfied with her work, the CEO was dissatisfied for some reason, and to show his displeasure, he grabbed he prototype and started stomping on it. As you read these stories, ask yourself, "Is this the type of person whom I would like to work for?" I'd imagine that for most anyone with a healthy amount of self-esteem, the answer would be a resounding "NO!" MISCELLANEOUS - The amount of paid time off you accrue is quite poor. And it can be intimidating even just asking to use your paid time off, for the reasons I mentioned above. - The parking situation isn't great - there's a bit of a lack of space, and many people are forced to park on gravel. - Most of what the company makes is used by the military, so if you have ethical problems with that sort of thing, you're not going to have much that you'll be proud to work on.