Basically, they are slaves to their stock holders:
- Profit sharing is a hoax; they manipulate the number however they want. It is much much smaller than real profit sharing would be, and it does not linearly correspond to how well business has done recently, nor even to the stock price. In fact, often times sales go up and profit sharing goes down. You will see less money than they claim to give you during their recruiting spiel.
- Your "profit sharing" (read: reason for them to be stingy with everything) will not make up for the fact that they have capped your salary such that if you do a perfect job, then you will get a 3% raise (maximum), barely keeping up with inflation. That percentage has also been steadily decreasing over the past five years.
- There are no perks whatsoever. Free snacks? Ha ha, you wish! There is not even a water cooler! Not one water cooler in all five buildings at headquarters. The company will not pay for you to drink purified water at work. You can guess the rest of the perks from there. Their reason? "Profit sharing". That would work fine as a company strategy if it were actually unadulterated, honestly-calculated profit sharing.
- There are barely any windows or skylights. You will work in a drab cubicle and walk through colorless hallways, under glaring fluorescent lights all day long.
- HR forgot what the first letter of their department stands for. They do not have any means for employees to meet or organize clubs, no team outings or even on-site team building. They act like robots, barely doing what they are told. Expect no empathy from them. To their credit, the company structure is such that they work for the CFO. Their job is to save money.
- As an engineer, you likely have never seen equipment as old or minimal as that with which you will be expected to work. Save money.