Hand On - Process Engineer Powdermet Employee Review

Could work on a distance, nice smart very reasonable boss, nice salary, very educated, motivated, smart people in the staff. A lot of trust between the people. A lot of work - but also a lot of assignments to chose from.

The area is bad; everybody needs to travel from afar to get to work, the workload is very large - so there is always something to do on the weekends. The company has strong connections with oil producers, that are in the downturn now.

-Employees have a lot of freedom to run their own projects and self-manage. -Managers seemed to genuinely care about the concerns of employees.

-Management promises big results to customers but oftentimes employees do not have the resources to deliver. I had to spend most of my time refurbishing old, defunct equipment rather than conducting the research promised to customers. -Very high turnover of staff; during my year with the company, nearly half of the employees left and were replaced. A manager even said to me during the interview process that he has a "difficult time keeping engineers for more than a year". -Workplace safety standards were rather lax despite the dangerous nature of materials that are commonly used. There were many roof leaks in the machine shop and chemical storage areas and the heating and cooling systems were very inconsistent throughout the labs which would affect experiments. -Management could be a bit erratic and would regularly propose and abandon different initiatives every few weeks. -Salaries are much lower than what is typically offered for comparable positions at other companies.