Great Place to Build a Career - Senior Optical Engineer Rocky Mountain Instrument Employee Review

This is a great place to work, beautiful location and fantastic people.

The benefits are a little lackluster.

The technical leadership (CTO, production managers, etc.) are very intelligent, resourceful and earnest people. I learned a lot from the guys at the top. The company's product (optical components) has a massive number of applications and hence the potential customer base is- in theory- huge. That's always helpful for people in sales. RMI has solid brand recognition when it comes to extremely high-end custom optics, and it excels in delivering many products that other companies would not dare to attempt.

There is almost no communication or coordination between production and sales; sales people frequently don't find out that their jobs will be significantly late until the due date is already upon them. Bad publicity due to mistakes made by the company in 2007 has left an extremely damaging stigma that is virtually impossible to overcome for the sales group attempting to sell to new or former customers. Because of the custom nature of the products, there is no standard pricing methodology and RMI's prices are frequently shockingly higher than their competitors'. Competition from Chinese manufacturers has wiped out the vast majority of the optics market, and-like other American optics companies- RMI really has no way to combat this. There are very entrenched cliques within the sales group, and new salespeople are faced with the option of either kowtowing to the veterans or dealing with a hostile and confrontational workplace.