Pros
- Work on a cool product in a cool industry - Work with very smart, educated, driven, ethical and helpful coworkers - Can learn about most facets of engineering: fluid flow, mechanical design, thermodynamics, material science, CAD and CAE - After learning engineering, can go into marketing, sales or services jobs - Fast work pace and most jobs demand leading teams from various disciplines - Some award structure ($50 - $1000)
Cons
- It is a complex machine in a complex industry that takes years to build the indepth understanding to be successful where there is little room for error. These machines do fly. - Management and HR make hiring decisions based more on image and "who do you know" rather than concentrating on performance - If you want to be a technical leader, be prepared to feel undervalued and left behind with respect to career advancement - If you want to get into management, plan on changing jobs every 2 years since breadth is more valued than depth - No bonuses unless in management - Technical design space is very limited so as to mitigate technical, schedule and cost risks. Very difficult to be truly creative - No salary increases in 2009, medical benefits significantly reduced (results in approx -5% drop in take home pay) - Almost all engineering teams have significant offshore engineering teams. Pros and cons about this, but mostly it feels that eventually most detail engineering work will be done outside the US while just project management and export control is done here. - Most jobs will require 45-50 hours just to meet minimum requirements. To excel, plan on 60+ hours / week. - Layoffs, turnover and voluntary job eliminations have reduced the average engineering time on job to less than 5 years. That means the young engineers have very few experienced engineers to get help from and the few older engineers are constantly helping the younger ones plus training and checking the work of the offshore engineers which leaves them little time to do their own job which typically results in excessive stress and low job performance. - Company seems to consistently take easy way out (layoffs, no raises, reduce benefits) when trying to make profits for GE Corporate. Long term strategy is uncertain. Appears to be significant amount of wasted money when looking at business processes. - Bottom line: compared to peers in other companies, industries and professions, the workload, stress, eroding benefits and mediocre pay does not appear to make the trades worth it.