A couple of bright spots, but it is a long way to go before GE's the employer of choice.
Pros
They employee fantastic people. Some are the foremost experts in their fields and it is great to work with and learn from extremely knowledgeable people. GE is an excellent place for women to work. This may be due to the fact that management is somewhat traditional, but it seems flexible work arrangements are considered and awarded to women more frequently. GE has a very strong volunteer group that does a lot of community service in the Upstate of South Carolina. For example, GE is a primary sponsor of Hands On Greenville and employee participation usually is on the order of several hundred employees. Lastly, Greenville is great location, it is not too large but large enough to bring in diverse performances and cultural events.
Cons
The average work week at GE is greater then 40 hours. "Casual" overtime is often expected and usually puts people work week between 50 to 60 hours. For regular employees GE has an extremely poor compensation plan. Top performers get ~5% raises on ~16 month interval. The majority of employees get 2 to 4% raises on a cycle greater then 16 months. Flexible Work Arrangements are not a "true" option. There is way too much opportunity for losses in productivity due to the informal "casual" overtime policy. Manufacturing engineering and design engineering have a poor relationship, so much so that manufacturing will not share office space with design. This causes a lack of space for the design employees, so often times six people are squeezed into a four cube area. Attrition seems to be getting worse and the quality of new employees is not as good as in the past. I believe lack of talent is driven by a desire to rapidly grow so a strategy of quantity over quality was employed. The attrition and lack of talent causes additional problems, employees usually split time trying to train the new people but often see the good ones leave in a year or two, while the ones lacking skill stick around taking a long time getting up to speed. Over the past couple of years GE has started reducing benefits for regular workers. Two good examples of this are a 20% increase in heath insurance and 33% increase in medical copays. GE relies very heavily on "outsourcing" and feels it is the future of the company, even though the quality of work is often poor. Human resources are completely incompetent and I am not actually sure what value they bring GE.
