Inadequate computer-aided resources, low salary, old procedures, no growing opportunities - Senior Engineer Advanced Cooling Technologies Employee Review

With the swift changes in the space industry including the recent rounds of layoffs at NASA JPL, Maxar Technologies, etc. Advanced Cooling Technologies has begun to come to its knees with future sells and fundings insecure and muddy. Traditionally, this small business in Lancaster, PA is always understaff with minimal employee salary and benefit. So I don’t know what surprises the future would hold for us during this uncertain times. Even without this unusual space business shift, we weren’t able to bid on many government proposal solicitations as a result of our extremely high overhead > 100% and heat pipe technology stalls. We usually collaborate with university professors with cheap graduate labor cost. On most of projects, while we need and appreciate working with well-known researchers and professors, we can’t offer them more than 10K from budget which some who run their labs with several million dollars per year, would find it very insulating and never responds back to our poor engineering staffs. We had multiple major fights with our academic collaborators and business professionals over fund allocations, resulted in them leaving the contract and alienating. The company product-portfolio is stalled due to extreme cost of automation. All of our manufacturing technicians are still doing handy jobs like 1940s such as cutting pipes and sheets, soldering, welding and brazing pipes with porous wraps … With business revenue considerably declining and frugal expenditures, the company has come to a point where we have only 2 SOLIDWORKS and 1 Ansys licenses up for over 70ish engineers in PD and R&D, which further delays our deliverables.