Better have a big tongue and a taste for boot soles - Engineer Flex Employee Review

You won't get very far on merit alone. From talking to a few people in various departments, starting salaries are lower than lower than industry standard. It seems that if you get paid above the company average you are expected to give the company your life and all free time. There is a "60 hour" cap for exempt (hourly) workers but management won't do much for you as a salaried worker unless you have a good relationship with them. HR is joke and will sweep things under the rug to avoid having to do paperwork or escalate the situation. As stated above, you won't see yourself up the corporate ladder without active engagement in politics and brown nosing. If you have a good enough relationship with upper middle management, you can forget worrying about dealing with your peers directly. For applying to positions within the company, your manager's approval is required (not the con in this situation.) There is an engineer who worked tirelessly to lose the respect of not only his entire department, but every department in which he has worked with during his time at the company. He not only showed very little technical aptitude, he has close to no work ethic, very little respect for anyone he works with, and an extremely poor attitude. Since he has a nose for superiors, he got to work as soon as he realized who the power players were and developed "relationships" with the ones that weren't intelligent enough to realize that he was only using them to climb to the next rung. This is anecdotal, but I'm sure his manager liked him as little as all of the people that he worked with and almost surely would not approve of his internal transfer request. But nonetheless, he got a promotion (grade level for sure, unsure of compensation) to the department headed by the individual that he sucked up to.