Pros
- Good Benefits (401k, Healthcare, Tuition Reimbursement, etc.) - Mission/Work is engaging and rewarding being in the medical device industry and being able to help people - Pockets of good people I enjoyed working with - Employee own development in role
Cons
Leadership is more willing to payout a severance and replace you almost immediately with someone else rather than promote. This has happened repeatedly. At one point a couple years before their most recent layoff in Salt Lake City, leadership ended up laying off senior level manufacturing engineers because they wanted to mirror a sister site in Cork's business model. They then moved to doing that with R&D the year after. What came with that was lost expertise replaced with entry level engineers right out of school that didn't know anything. Then, when newer engineers did start getting experienced and grew, management didn't promote them and those newer and now experience engineers ended up leaving. When those newer engineers did leave, they replaced them with senior level engineers changing the business model again to reflect the historical model. That also happened to me growing into a site SME role for certain elements of the QMS after I started in production supporting manufacturing lines. Even though, I got more responsibilities, the title of the role stayed the same and they came up with every excuse possible not to promote only to be one of the more recent experienced people laid off and a month later my job gets posted with the title reflective of the role. Furthermore, the business model doesn't bode well for company growth. Stryker's Neurovascular business has grown through procurement not R&D from what I saw. There was a R&D project started 5 years ago for a brand-new product and it has constantly run into hiccups. The only innovation I saw from R&D was a longer corewire which isn't much of an innovation and I wouldn't be surprised if they get surpassed by a startup currently progressing rapidly in the SLC valley in relation to their product portfolio. That is unless they just purchase the product and transfer it over like they did with their other neurovascular products. That is the reason for the headline because they are going nowhere regarding innovation and people management because the leadership is only trying to keep the business running rather than grow. In addition to that mess, the culture in SLC doesn't reflect the corporate values and mission. The people they've hired more recently are more pensive and sensitive to resistance rather than thick skinned and didn't grow up familiar with the mantra of "sticks and stones may break bones, but words will never hurt me." This is different from another company I worked for prior to Stryker that had more of a straightforward and thick-skinned culture. The company I moved to after being laid off also has a thick-skinned culture as well. I've heard the sites back east are different as far as culture and people back east I've worked with seem reflective of that assumption rather than SLC so it may just be the west coast sites in Fremont and SLC.