The tech research job was great for gaining experience, but it is a big company with structure and conservatism.
Pros
All my engineering co-workers were competent and gave great effort to follow through on the right decisions. It took some looking, but I was able to find great leaders (usually lower level) and work with them as much as possible because they cared, championed, and enabled the people around them. For an entry level graduate engineer, the compensation and broad experiences were great. Finally due to the nature of the age of the corporation their is ripe opportunity to bring new perspectives and technologies to the production and equipment technology in use. If you can bring a new technique to the corporation, you can easily make a name for yourself and become an expert.
Cons
The more I was exposed to higher leadership (primarily in research and production), the more I was surprised and somewhat disheartened by a lack of cohesive vision for the company. The corporation acts more like a loosely connected coalition of business units and divisions, rather than a singular brand. This seemed to have the effect of: a diluted vision, decoupled responsibilities, a variety of confusing and thick middle management layers, slow responses to change, duplicated efforts, and a lack of focus on internal and external customers. It feels like programs and changes intended to engage and empower employees (like innovation, strategy, and customer advocacy and experience) end up being fads rather than deep cultural investments. Finally, I will say that the corporate culture has the, I believe unintended effect, of making the definition of 'leadership' equal to one who takes great political and career affecting risk to see some goal accomplished. Whereas I believe the best leaders I've experienced have 1) a strong vision that invigorates and invites people with a variety of skills, 2) the courage to enable those motivated workers to execute their talents to the quality they wish to reflect their reputation and integrity, and 3) the strength to defend their teams when budgets get tight or development gets challenging.
