Pros
Diversity of projects without building expertise in a single domain (if that is desired).
Cons
Management - The St. Petersburg healthcare design group is run under a mob mentality with zero transparency and accountability for unilateral actions taken by the site director and the supporting managers without balancing employee concerns and fears. During project bids for instance, estimates on scope and labor from experienced senior engineers are ignored in favor of underbidding quotes and winning projects. This detrimental practice catches up very quickly as it is realized during successive engineering phases from engineering design test (EDT), engineering verification test (EVT) and design verification test (DVT) that there was a gross misalignment in the original quotations which is misaligned with the customers' expectations. This results in issuance of contract change orders at repeated intervals to the consternation of the customers. And although senior engineers feel vindicated when this happens, they are left overwhelmed with the "I told you so" syndrome. Lack of Career Opportunities - Overall, there is lack of youth, women and minorities in the design center with these scarcities exacerbated particularly at management levels. Contractors are also predominantly older (>50 years) white men who are brought in mainly on the basis of their years of work experience regardless of how relevant that work is to the given project’s resourcing needs. A further downside of this practice is that junior engineers are almost never given more responsibilities thereby enabling them to successively prove they are eventually promotion worthy. To this end, the lack of promotions even for the most senior engineering staff based on exemplary performance reviews are held back and blamed on HR and other bureaucratic factors by the management. The company executive officers including the CEOs of Jabil Inc. and Jabil Healthcare keep touting the role of women and its importance within the company. However, the hiring practices run counter to these lip services, as within the engineering staff, women are not sought out or hired for roles in systems, electromechanical or software functions. Lack of Transparency - This is especially evident when it comes to how bonuses are given out. Employees are provided only with a rough sketch of their annual performance evaluations and told that they will receive a writeup informing them of their annual bonus payout. A couple of months go by and this writeup is not received. Eventually a payout is made; however, management or HR will not bother to explain the breakdown of the payout with respect to the management-based objective (or MBO) targets for the fiscal year. HR overall is absent from interactions with employees when it comes to face time or even generic email communications with respect to employee's growth, development or understanding of ongoing concerns with respect to management. Many of us still do not know who our group's HR representative is. Facility - The healthcare group was moved to the single-story Jabil Innovation Center (JIC) about a year ago. The facility was already overfilled and employs an open layout devoid of cubicles which is extremely disruptive to performing quiet and cohesive deep analytical work. Further, this facility is not equipped with security staff and front desk greeting staff thereby heightening security and medical risks for several employees. Parking is extremely limited with people having to park off site during customer visits which are more frequent lately. The above inconveniences along with healthcare management's abuse of power and continuous disregard for transparency in many work facets have led to significant declines in employee welfare and morale.
