Job Title: RF Engineer
Location: Seattle, WA
Submitted on: 05-Apr-03
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Job Title |
Workplace
Survey |
| RF Engineer |
The Good:
Flexible dress code, hours, offices are nice locations, probably larger
than average desks and office spaces, free tea, coffee, hot chocolate.
Average worker is polite and professional, diverse groups and managers,
while even the most extreme people remain polite and professional.
The Bad:
Upper management seems clueless to the real needs of managers, employees
and resources needed to get the job done. The company vision is visible,
but the path is vague.
In order to cut costs, layoffs have occurred every year or so in the 6
years I was there. Laid off employees were often replaced with lower
salaried contractors and consultants that are not as effective as real
employees. Contractors often have multiple conflicting supervisors
making it difficult to manage time and projects.
Compared to monthly training back in '95, training is practically nothing
today, unless you consider diversity sessions career enhancement. Stock
options are worthless, morale and communication are low, and duplicitous
work and territorial politics abound.
As AWS moves towards a pure sales and marketing company, they have let go
of intelligent technical people and the network quality has suffered
greatly. It is very difficult to get a technical job there since most of
the technical work is outsourced and technical openings have been filled
with less qualified laid off employees or program managers.
Recently the knowledge gap between upper management and the workers who
actually get the job done has widened drastically, leading to a
completely reactive mode. Planning is nill, everyone is too busy putting
out fires to plan and prevent new ones.
There's been a recent move to shrink cubicles to 3x3 cublets for
contractors, barely enough room for monitor, keyboard, phone & mouse.
If you're a sales & marketing person, it's a difficult push to sell
products and keep customers happy. The AT&T name no longer sells itself.
If your a technical kind of person, avoid AWS and try for the vendors
like Ericsson, Nokia, Nortel, etc. That's where all the good stuff is
going on.
Despite all this, AWS might succeed in spite of itself, but the
innovative McCaw culture is gone.
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