After the Honeywell purchase, I had concern about layoffs. After speaking to several people that had been through their own Honeywell acquisitions, the consensus was they would make some leadership changes, but keep most everyone else on payroll. BUT I was also told "people will just leave." I thought this to be an interesting statement, yet it has proven to be 100% accurate. Over the years following the acquisition, all the senior leadership was replaced with corporate lackeys that did not share the previous management style that had fostered the tremendous growth of the company and sense of belonging for employees. Gone were the friendly and engaged conversations between upper management and lower level employees, replaced with the corporate BS so commonplace in multinationals like Honeywell. Honeywell is 100% focused on shareholder satisfaction, and 0% of employees. Townhall after townhall meeting employee concerns were dismissed, and well respected employees (including company founders) that had departed were badmouthed by high-level speakers. Company focus shifting to shareholder satisfaction over customer satisfaction meant the quality of product and support of products suffered substantially. Intelligrated always prided itself on being “one of the most desirable places to work in Cincinnati.” Interestingly, post-Honeywell the 3rd party surveys were no longer distributed.
As far as compensation goes, base pay was decent. Profit sharing had been part of compensation pre-Honeywell, but it was taken away. 401k matching went up(marginally) to a pretty decent level, BUT only if you remained for the entire year. Vesting went from day 1 to 3 years. Vacation went from a standard years-of-service based increase to “unlimited” vacation. Most people handled this reasonably, and continued to take similar time off, but some individuals took advantage of the situation. This prompted departmental changes to limit the unlimited vacation, directly against the corporate policy. It also meant that you would no longer get vacation paid out if it was remaining when you left the company. Raises also mostly became mostly non-existent. Very limited pools of money were made available for managers to distribute to their employees, so even exemplary performance would net a raise barely equal to cost-of-living increases.
As far as actual working conditions, these started high, but have been moving (quickly) in a downward direction since Honeywell. There were a number of large projects that were handled by my group, and while some of these required lots of extra working hours, the premium pay compensation was decent. I left before the new policy of 48+ went into effect. When I started we were 100% domestic and had great working relationships with other engineering groups throughout the country. The Honeywell changes pushed a lot of engineering efforts to “LQRs” (low quality regions), and that relegated domestic engineers to be project managers with constantly changing “resources” based in India. Constantly changing team members meant a big reduction in productivity, and many projects could not be completed on schedule due to bringing the new people up to speed almost weekly. There was also a big difference in the quality of work and vested interest in the product. I signed up to be a design engineer, not a project manager, so that change was a big negative for me. There was a constant battle between product engineers and “cost out”(make it in China) engineers that wanted to cheapen up the products, without regard for the quality of the finished product. Components were looked at singly, rather than at a system level. The cost-out work(including very nasty “negotiations” over pricing) resulted in many longstanding great working relationships with suppliers being destroyed. One specific example from a 15+ year supplier was “don’t ever f-ing call me again.” There were also wedges pushed between the different product groups, with favoritism being overtly blatant. Only managers pets got promotions; everyone else was stagnated in position. The only options were lateral moves to work on different products, or to other engineering groups.
In short, Honeywell destroyed the company that I had fully planned on retiring from, and I have a number of years of work remaining. I wish others still remaining there the best of luck, but would suggest looking elsewhere for a company that cares about it’s employees. I have been overwhelmingly happy since leaving; I knew I didn’t like it there, but didn’t fully realize how bad it was until I left.
