Pros
A surprisingly casual place for a machinist doing a large variety of short production runs of internal jobs. There aren’t rigid roles as far as programming, setup, operator, quality, tools, materials, maintenance, etc., but honestly the actual work load expectations were pretty reasonable. Parts will typically be assembled in adjacent bays by high-skill people that will work with you to solve problems, keeping things low stress. I was always supported in learning equipment and jobs I hadn’t seen and management is unusually accommodating. There was some old school surface plate inspection, a lot of castings, and occasionally I made new processes and programs. I was working through most ops on mill jobs at as a machinist there, so I’m guessing anyone would learn a lot no matter your experience level. The work day in the machine shop was the most flexible I have ever heard of for a production setting. If you get good parts done, get your 40 in and can show up at a reasonable and consistent time, they seemed to accommodate it.
Cons
Turn over is an issue in the shop, warehouse and especially the office, primarily due to retirement. Holes are plugged with younger people that burn out, get tired of the commute, leave due to personal issues, etc. Their biggest challenge at this point is knowledge transfer between generations, so this could work in your favor if you plan to stick around and are actually interested in what goes in to making and (mostly) distributing machine tools and supporting them. If you want to be doing five axis or modern mill turn work, that’s not going to happen at DoALL. Basically only two or three other people will really know what’s going on machining-wise, and they aren’t looking to shake things up. It’s a pretty clean shop- by cast iron standards. Not an air conditioned job shop making implantable medical stuff…