Most of the senior leadership are frankly useless. They have little to no strategy, are poor at communicating, and have squandered so many opportunites for the business. The business always seems to be in a state of chaos as a result.
A small number of hero engineers work tirelessly to keep the business running whilst getting little thanks or recognition for their talent and skill from the senior leadership. Instead the engineers often get blamed for the mistakes of the senior leadership or told they are not working hard enough.
The salary is not competative and professional progression is too slow. The current promotion process and grading framework are frankly a joke. They were clearly deliberately designed to be very vague and opaque by the senior leadership to allow them to fabricate any excuse necessary to not promote you. The engineers' contributions and hard work are rarely recognised because there is no objective performance tracking mechanism in place.
The business has failed to invest to many of its products, so they have mostly not succeeded. Senior leadership are paralysed by fear of the risk of investing, so instead do nothing and miss out on opportunites.
To sum up, Roke is a company filled with exceptionally talented and hard working engineers who care deeply about the work they do. But, the engineers are continuously failed by poor leadership/management, and are rarely rewarded for their hard work.
All the problems are fixable and Marc Overton has promised to fix them. I hope he does because I love working at Roke and I want these things to get fixed. I will still recommend Roke to a friend as I believe things will get fixed.
