Pros
Golden CO is a beautiful little town. Company is or could be involved in some interesting markets and could have decent potential. Might be OK as a first job out of college.
Cons
The company seems fixated on maximizing profits - even at the expense of future growth. It generally views its customers as adversaries in pricing battles and seeks to deliver minimal quality standards. It spends meagerly on things like R&D, infrastructure and marketing. For a self-proclaimed “high-tech” company it rarely comes up with any thing innovative on its own. Management seems very risk adverse. Its growth model seems to be one of acquiring well-established and viable business then gutting them to maximize profits (wealth extraction). They apply a simplified one-size-fits-all management philosophy to all their businesses. This simplistic approach has resulted in failures of several business units and significant loss of market share in others. Their typical response to a business downturn is to immediately shed employees and increase prices (hardly a winning strategy for future growth). Wages for worker bees are well below average. They prefer to hire temporaries for manufacturing positions. At middle management/professional levels their salaries are mediocre at best. My suspicion is at the director and VP levels the compensation is considerably better. Nepotism is ever-present. There is a whiff of religion that finds its way into the culture (e.g. the company employs local church “chaplains” in lieu of an EAP). Communication within the company is virtually nonexistent.