Pros
Flexible working
Sometimes interesting projects
Range of benefits
Cons
Underpaid by about 10-15k for the work I'm doing. Promotions are done through applying internally for job roles which are few and far between. No straightforward route for progression. Usually you have to leave your department or the company to get a decent raise in line with your skills and responsibilities. Heavy emphasis on senior technical roles to comply with company "values" and tick arbitrary HR boxes on leadership skills. Those who are good at regurgitating buzzwords progress, decent technically skilled engineers who can't do this stuff do not. No clear technical route for progression, you have to go into management if you want more money. We used to have a performance based bonus but that was taken away so we were forced to unionise.
Incredibly frustrating environment full of contradictions, e.g. we're CONSTANTLY fighting for budget and resource - short sightedness, no willingness to invest in crucial technology, but at the same time we're pressured to spend allocated budget by Christmas in any way possible or lose it. They would rather we spent hundreds of thousands leasing equipment than just buy it for its significantly cheaper depreciated value. They're happy to spend millions flying people around Europe for meet and greets but baulk at spending a few 10s of thousands to do a project right first time.
It's a talking shop, days are full of meaningless meetings and hot air. Actual decisions are very rare, management would rather kick the can down the road until they literally can't anymore, and then we've got to break our backs and cut corners (for non flight components) to make up the shortfall for all that wasted time - we're always firefighting completely preventable and foreseeable problems caused by this, then we have to pressure our suppliers for short lead times and potentially damage relationships. From speaking to others, this is a common experience across projects and disciplines.
Everyone is massively overloaded and stressed. Every now and then they send out comms on "how to better manage stress". Perhaps management not causing it in the first place might be helpful.
Pathetic in-fighting between teams, managers guarding their theifdoms. Technologies not being allowed to develop in the UK if a French or German manager has already claimed it as their own.
Procurement activities forced onto the engineers and purchase order approvals have been farmed out, we have to raise orders ourselves and they usually get denied due to arcane procurement rules by someone that we can't contact in any way other than through a chat on the order - they have no email addresses or phone numbers. This can add weeks or months to an order.
Covid voluntary redundancy - 100s or 1000s of highly experienced senior engineers were given generous early retirement packages. This was good of the company, but pragmatically all that experience walking out the door is causing problems and we're not even designing a new aircraft.
Demoralising overdone "safety" mindset which most find to be patronising/ condescending/ infantilizing. Hours of communications recently just on how important it is we hold handrails while climbing stairs, monitoring and reporting people for not holding handrails or carrying coffee upstairs, getting yellow parking stickers on your car if you don't reverse into a space.
I could go on.
