Pros
As stated in the job descriptions, it is fun to see designs come to life and there's just a certain "cool factor" about knowing that the robots you programmed are running smoothly, quickly, and efficiently. Payday is weekly every Thursday which is actually quite nice. Management provides engineers with a lot of responsibility which can be good because it allows people to advance quickly and to learn a lot.
Cons
Don't believe all the positive reviews on this website. A while back, HR noticed that the company was getting bad reviews on Glassdoor and so they asked all the managers to post good reviews. So, read them with a grain of salt. With that said, the entire company culture at JR can be summarized in one word: workaholic. Expect to work at least 50 hours every single week and, on rare occasions, I have even heard of people working 100 hour weeks. I know people who frequently work up to 14-15 hour days and I have even heard of people working 20 hour days. While those are uncommon for most people, 12-13 hour days are not. There's strong pressure for people to work on Saturdays and even some Sundays. I've heard of some people working on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and other holidays. Technically, people have the ability to take some time off that's not part of their regular PTO after they've worked a lot of hours but, in my experience, there's a big social pressure to not take any time off. Admittedly, this might not be as much of a JR issue as it is an engineering and West Michigan issue but there is a very noticeable lack of diversity in the company. I'd say that, at most, 5-10% of the company are not caucasian males. While that's not necessarily a problem in and of itself, I have heard from some of the minority groups at JR that they feel a little uncomfortable with the lack of racial and gender diversity. The pay is also below average in terms of the engineering industry. Management justifies that by paying you overtime for the many hours of overtime you inevitably end up working. This brings the total pay up to about industry average but, in terms of dollars per hour, it still ends up being below average. As a final note, the work itself that controls engineers do really isn't particularly difficult compared to some of the other sub-disciplines in electrical engineering and, after less than a year at the company, I felt like I had climbed 90% of the controls engineering learning curve and that, from that point on, I'd only be doing slight variations on stuff I had previously been doing. So, this isn't so much a "con" as much as it is a word of warning: it's possible that, after working for 4+ years to get an engineering degree, you might end up being disappointed by how easy and monotonous the work you're doing becomes. In summary, some people love working at JR because the budding engineer does get more responsibility than they most likely would at a lot of other companies and some people just absolutely love the work they're doing but, unless you're prepared to work a lot of overtime (including weekends and holidays) at a below-average pay and are prepared to make your career your life, I would recommend staying away from JR.