Intense and exciting product development
Pros
Extremely strong upper management, through the hard economic times in 2008-2010, Eaton opted to force a majority of the workforce to take 4 weeks of unpaid leave throughout the year rather than implementing broad spectrum layoffs. While this was a bit painful for everybody, it was a much better alternative to losing talented staff and having to rebuild after the economy picked back up. You get a sense that employees and especially long term employees are taken care of, rather then thrown on the dustbin to hire younger, cheaper replacements. Work life balance was stressed, if extra time off was needed for family reasons, management was understanding and flexible. Our engineering group feels like family rather than a cold corporate workplace, particularly in the Cherrington, PA office. I was on an engineering team responsible for new product development of meters and relays, and we were always very busy with new product development. The hours could be long, but you were never worried about running out of things to do. Talented engineers could expect to be able to grow with their abilities within the company.
Cons
The biggest worry I have is a stubborn streak in upper management to outsource to India small to large portions of new product development. I spent about half of each year working long hours to pick up the pieces of outsourced work product and refactor it into something that could be released to customers with pride. There is a culture of inertia in staffing up internal engineering resources to handle the demand for new product development. Senior engineers will find themselves spending 30-50% of their time on conference calls in the early morning with Indian outsourcing companies, and late hours in the day trying to improve the output of these companies into something that can pass quality inspections to be put into end products. If you can manage to get your foot in the door and are a highly capable engineer, you will be valued and find a long term place in the company, but getting in can be difficult.
