Product Engineering Review – WET, a place of contemptible values and practices - Senior Product Engineer WET Employee Review

The simple synopsis is that there are fundamental flaws in how the company is operated and the accompanying toxic culture it has created. As WET is privately held, it is not accountable to any board of directors but rather to the whims of the single owner. Concepts are sold to customers with little engineering input for development schedule. Cash flow management is budgeted with razor thin timing. Any slip in schedule coupled with the unreasonable deadlines, and that puts massive pressure on shipping products to book revenue before they are ready or have been thoroughly tested. Last minute changes and micro managing by the owner worsens the problem, all the while he threatens to fire people with his official “bottom 10% engineers” annual turnover policy. Poor quality products have high infant mortality rates, putting engineering into constant fire fighting mode. Remedying products in the field puts further pressure on profit margins. Under threat of losing their jobs, cross department mangers have made finger pointing an established company value. Morale collapses, and voluntary exits of talented people increase the turn over ratio until company knowledge is undone. Rinse and repeat and you have the worst set of company culture and values that you could find anywhere. All of this stems from the single owner, Mark Fuller, who styles himself as the Steve Jobs of water feature design by mimicking the famous capricious behavior and eye for aesthetics while missing Job’s strategic vision and demand that aesthetics be coupled with excellent function and quality. At this point, HR likes to counter negative reviews by claiming that the employee either was “a bad cultural fit for our fast pace” or “disgruntled because they were let go”. Let me dismiss that claim right now and establish that this is a genuine, fact driven engineering review. I come from multiple fast paced industries, small and large companies, and know what good company culture and ethics are. I do not come from an aerospace background, whose engineers typically struggle to adapt to WET’s loosely structured project environment composed of weak design processes and light testing requirements. I was not let go and multiple mangers have made it clear that I won’t be. The cultural problems at WET begin right when you are recruited. HR was not very forthcoming to me about exactly the last time they were late on payroll, only referring to the 2008-2010 down turn. Nor were they up front about the lack of dependent health care coverage during the offer process. Many employees with families have found themselves getting a rude surprise one month in at the benefits enrollment meeting when they find out WET doesn’t subsidize the health care of dependents. There has been a recent change for 2015 to contribute 50% of dependent costs, but this is still well below industry standard. The bigger problem with this is that you have an HR department that hasn’t been forthcoming with a known problem. To their credit, they have recently gotten better with communicating this to recruits, not after complaints forced change, but after hiring managers were forcing the issue by informing potential hires ahead of time. Once you start working at WET, the structural problems with the company culture, organization, and business quickly become apparent. First it will seem minor. It’ll seem odd that as an engineer that you have to electronically punch in every day. Then it seems unusually inefficient that mechanical engineers are expected to share CAD workstations and use iPads for everything else, even writing e-mails and using Excel. Remember how everything looked cool and the open environment seemed so progressive when you interviewed? Now you realize that engineers are crowded together and that you don’t have a complete desk to yourself. I can’t believe I am writing this, but WET has made me pine for the days of when I had a cubicle in a beige, cube farm. When you start getting projects you will notice that they are consistently understaffed and so aggressively and inflexibly scheduled that the scope of the project must exclude thorough testing, quality, or some aspect of functionality. Senior engineers will start to observe that any reasonable schedule they give to complete a project is usually cut in half. That is because the schedule is driven by the contract ship dates and making cash flow. Any engineering input, while asked for during the scheduling process, is usually ignored. Most engineers have to put in long hours without respite. Dates are very difficult to make as engineers are often correcting field problems from other employees who no longer work there, which cuts into the scheduled development time. Worsening the problem is that the owner is famous for changing requirements or product aesthetics at the last minute without changing schedule. These means untested changes making it into the field. Worse, the last minute changes are almost never data or analytically driven. Worse yet is that the changes may occur without the knowledge of the responsible engineer. Historically (and currently), the senior management of engineering, whether the director or VP of engineering, has been powerless to refuse or significantly influence the owner’s whims. Once it becomes apparent that their jobs are dependent upon appeasing the owner, they either quit or become yes men. In fact most long-term executive managers at WET are basically yes men. This also creates a toxic culture of covering your butt and inter-departmental finger pointing instead of a healthy company value of creating solutions, not blame. Both the culture and the owner’s frequent firings of engineers, either from random spot firings or from his official policy of firing the bottom 10% engineers annually (also without warning), creates a massive turnover ratio amongst engineers and incredibly low morale. More engineers seem to quit than get fired, but either way it destroys the organizational memory. When something in the field has a problem, chances are no one will be around to explain the design to you. Some other highlights: The phrase doing something “The WET Way” is openly used as a term of derision. Current engineers have refered to the “Caveat Emptor” Glassdoor review as a completely accurate guide to the company. Even old review criticisms of the company seem to still be in play. All those old reviews can’t still be relevant, right? Wrong. I have seen examples of even the most outrageous claims: 1. Managers hired to intimidate employees? Check 2. Use of abusive language by said managers and even the owner of the company? Check (first time I had to break up a fight in the work place) 3. Product shipped knowingly incomplete or defective for cash flow? Check 4. Examples of incompetent senior exec’s and cronyism? Check 5. Employees worried about making payroll? Check 6. Drawings changed without knowledge of responsible engineer? Check. 7. Challenging management with data driven engineering results in termination? Check. A former engineer (who quit) and I had a long discussion about review credibility. If a review is too negative, will it look like a disgruntled employee wrote it? Will the review be weighted lightly by the reader because the tone appears disgruntled? He chose to give two stars to WET while being as objective as possible. Although it risks not being able to warn engineers away from this place, I prefer to describe reality as it is and give WET one star. Look, if you are reading this review because you have concerns about accepting employment at WET – then you are the perfect candidate to turn down working here. Believe me, you’ll regret it.