Engineering Department: Lack of Structure and Good ol' Boys Club
Pros
Benefits are standard and the pay is maybe a bit below average but not significantly so. The customer bar is open for everyone on Friday afternoon, if you so choose. The work environment is not too high-stress. If you fit in with the club, the world is your oyster. For some engineers but not all, it is a lot more hands-on than the average engineering environment. They allowed working from home during COVID lockdowns, so health is at least somewhat a priority.
Cons
Structure in the mechanical engineering department is sorely lacking. Almost a year in, I only had a vague idea of who did what or why. Either projects were assigned at random or I had no idea how they were assigned. There is absolutely no formal structure for determining who fits where in the department (both myself and someone who has been there 14 years are called: Mechanical Engineer). I never had it communicated to me what my role was supposed to be. To this day, I still have no concrete reason why they hired me at all. After the first major project I worked on was out the door, I bounced from project to project and machine to machine without another word. The work I received after that was never anything that couldn't be handled by an intern and when I was given something more complicated I was completely unprepared for the scope and having to work with departments I never had before, and the scale was much larger than what I had worked on by myself previously. The owner, who is smart and does know the business, seemingly attends meetings just to enforce his will on certain projects as he is stubborn. At one point in time, he called me out in front of the entire office (which is practically open given the waist high walls) for putting in too much work in on an R&D project, of course I was never told how much would be expected from such a project so I assumed I was doing my job. This is after he decided to start another company, which fabricates a lot of parts used at Infinity, and we were blanket told to order all parts from his new company even though he could see competitor pricing and often charged more himself: the textbook definition of a self-dealing conflict-of-interest. This is in addition to the general level of unprofessional behavior from this individual in the form of: showing sexually suggestive material, on his phone, to anyone who was around him at the office, constantly berating former employees (he never stopped about a particular former employee in the entire year), and attaching himself to meetings to either derail the conversation or just not pay attention. This was during COVID lockdowns, so maybe some of this might be solved in a more normal year but considering those who were hired after me and seeing their "development" I doubt it.
