technologist

accounting manager

product specialist

plc programmer

mechanical designer

FPS Food Process Solutions Corporation

Working at FPS was not a very enjoyable experience.  To begin with, there are no clear deadlines for projects within the engineering department.  They have a schedule but the schedule lists the shipping date for each job which does not provide any information in terms of when designs must be submitted to the shop and if you ask anyone when something needs to be submitted you will rarely obtain any answer other than ASAP.  This makes time management very difficult in this position.  There is also nearly no mentorship available within the engineering department.  Some senior engineers try to help as best they can when you have questions but more often than not, they are just too busy or not interested in instructing you so you will just be told to review or follow a certain reference job with limited or no explanation provided for the design justifications behind the decisions made previously.  Additionally, the CAD drawings produced on previous jobs do not comply with any known or widely accepted drafting standard.  They have their own drafting standard which omits important details in some places and grossly over-dimensions features in other places.  Previous drawings are also very hard to follow because of this and the fact that they tend to be a bit sloppy.  It also isn't very clear when design changes have been made on previous jobs, why those design changes were made, and what they entailed.  Oftentimes, I would follow a reference job given to me by senior engineers and try to use my best engineering judgement to reverse engineer what was done before in order to understand the design and produce good designs currently only to be told by production that the job I was referencing was outdated and not good to reference. The relationship between production and engineering at FPS is also very tense and will be especially stressful if you do not speak Cantonese.  Most of the production staff speaks Cantonese primarily and if you don't speak Cantonese in this position, they will often go to someone else in the engineering department that does speak Cantonese if there are issues producing your designs, meaning that you may not get proper feedback that you can use to improve your design ability and that your problems are effectively everybody else's problems to deal with.  Furthermore, there is no quality assurance program within the engineering department.  Unless you deliberately bother a senior engineer to take the time to check your drawings, no one will review your work or provide you feedback within what is supposed to be the "safe" environment of an engineering design environment.  In terms of the work culture within the engineering department,  there is a very heavy emphasis on mistakes.  Instead of viewing mistakes as valuable learning and employee development experiences, your worth/performance is basically measured in terms of how many mistakes you make on your drawings and every little mistake (even little ones like typos) is used in that performance score.  There is also a very poor attitude towards innovation and R&D.  Engineers are not given much freedom to develop and test new ideas.  For the most part, you are asked to basically just do the job of a run-of-the-mill draftsperson.  However, it is quite difficult to even settle in to just producing shop drawings as the strict rules within the office prohibit listening to music during office hours and you will get in trouble or even sometimes yelled at for being too slow with drawing production, even if your work pace has been praised at companies you have worked at previously.  Some engineers will even push themselves so hard that they will get carpel tunnel so it's pretty clear that they expect you to meet their demands even if it is to the detriment of your own health. The only upside I can think of to working at FPS is that the high turnover rate within the Engineering Department opens up a lot of opportunity very quickly.  But given the amount that engineers here are typically paid and all the other issues, it's not really worth it to run the gauntlet.  You're better off working somewhere else.

"If I got a chance to do it all over again, I'd immigrate to a country that's as far as it could get from FPS." That is how bad it is to work there. As a young engineer, you need a platform to show what you can do and how innovative you can get with your ideas. Is there a platform? Nope. Not even a peg to stand on. For whatever reason, they don't work on projects until they are weeks away from shipping and then everything is rushed. You're working long long hours to get the project done. I blame non-existent management skills in the leadership. Alright, may be this is their style of working. Who knows. Was I at least getting a good salary? Not at all. Almost every Monday after receiving my salary I had to contact HR to show my logged hours and that I was paid less. Such is the level of penny pinching that's going on. They want to hire great employees but at lower than market wages. That might work in China, but not here. About China - the company employees Chinese workers to work in the shop. Now, it makes your life as an engineer very very very hard if the shop wants to communicate with you. Shop then goes through people who can understand Chinese and Cantonese and can speak English to pass on their message. What is the result? The ease of work with you decreases. Over time, you are given projects that are easy and don't require much thinking so that the shop doesn't have to deal with you if you don't speak those languages. About 95% of the communication in office is in Chinese or Cantonese. Be prepared to be left out or labeled as 'hard to work with'. About projects - the work is already done in the past. There is no innovation that is going on. They just take what worked in the past, change the dimensions to match project requirements and that's it. That is what you're doing all day in 'Engineering'. A great way to do business, but not a great environment to be an engineer in. To make things worse - the company has inflated job titles to make the work look attractive to help with hiring process. I was called an 'Engineer' while in reality and like my agreement said I was basically a drafter. Be aware of stuff like that. The same goes for every single department in the company. The less important stuff - there is no sense of culture within the teams and the company has no respect for it employees. There are great opportunities out there, but trust me - this ain't one of them. In fact, it isn't even an opportunity. Run as far as you can. 

This is a Chinese based company, if you speak Mandarin, especially Cantonese, you will get along just fine with everyone and higher up management. 

The following are the pros and cons of being a field service technician.

PROS

1.	Knows a little bit of everything about freezer. (PLC, HMI, mechanical and electrical)
2.	Gets to go to a lot of places.
3.	Great job for saving money. (no time to spend your hard-earned money)

CONS

1.	Do not bother using field service technician as a leverage to become a PLC programmer, field service technician does very little of PLC programming. 
2.	Low annual pay & NO OVERTIME pay (Prepare to volunteer your time to work. Travel time does not count toward pay. NO HOILDAY, literally work on every holidays without any compensation)
3.	High pressure & on call (supper tight deadline, will have to be on site in short notice. If there is anything wrong with the freezer, the customer will wake you up even if it is nighttime. On call means there will be no holiday or hanging out with friends) 
4.	Long hours and stays on site until the work is done (typically working 12 to 14 hours a day when you are on site. normally on-site time takes around two to three weeks, sometime there will be back to back travels which takes up to months)
5.	For most of the time you will be alone (very little human interaction)
6.	Health concern: Walmart and other fast food chain are your best friends
7.	Poor management, the manager does not have enough technical skill to support you. (does not care what the problem is, ship you out to the job site is the number one priority)
8.	 Poor management (cont) (agree to whatever the manager says and there will not be any frustrating argument)
9.	A lot of design flaws (meaning a lot of problems to fix which postpone your stay at the site) 
10.	High risk and labor job (sometime driving in the poor weather condition. Working in cold and wet environment, and lots of mechanical issues which require heavy labor work) 
11.	Prepare to be single for the foreseeable future, even if you have a girlfriend, it will be hard to maintain the relationship
12.	Still forcing field service technician to travel during COVID-19 pandemic


It is sometimes difficult to communicate with workers at work. Most of the employee in this company are not fluent in spoken or written English, even higher management. Majority of the employees in this company are Chinese. I am very fortunate that I can understand both Chinese and English quite well. However, there are times where they host an internal meetings, and have their presentations and handouts in Chinese. Completely ignoring the needs of local and foreign employee who don't understand Chinese. This company is not a fair opportunity company, everyone's too busy pleasing their supervisor and higher up management.  There are projects with unreasonably tight deadline, which require you to work extensive overtime and your overtime work are not being paid for. And the reason behind the ridiculously tight schedule is because the management have left this job forgotten for half a year and when they realize that they are behind schedule, they will push all the responsibilities to their draftsmen and engineers, saying that they work slow and causes delay of shipments. After that, they will use that reason to fire people who work hard for them to help them catch up on that job. They do not value their employees at all. Engineering drawings are awfully messy and inaccurate, consistently find drawings with wrong dimensions when I was working there. Drawings are very unprofessional and very difficult to follow up. Supervisors will also tell you to turn a blind eye to whats wrong on the drawing, ignore the mistake and carry on with the job. I have encounter situation when workers on job site are not following safety procedures, working at higher ground without the use of safety belt and supervisor will turn a blind eye to it and often even ask you to perform the same dangerous action. The hardest part of the job is that your supervisor always expect you to please them at work. The only most enjoyable part of the job is leaving this company.

Working at this company has been an extremely disappointing experience. Here are some key issues:

Bizarre Micromanagement: The micromanagement here is absurd and serves no real purpose. Managers constantly boast about their so-called extensive management experience, but their actions produce zero positive results.

False Promises About Resources and Funding: Before joining, the company assured me that funding and resources were plentiful. However, once inside, it became clear that all they do is exaggerate and fabricate achievements. Forget about raises or access to the promised operational resources—they simply don’t exist.

Incompetent and Disrespectful Leadership: The manager doesn’t understand the work but insists on giving orders, pretending to be an expert. There’s no respect for employees or their expertise. Your opinion is irrelevant here; all that matters is blindly following the clueless commands of those in charge.

Inept IT Management: The IT management is shockingly incompetent. Employees often know far more about basic IT operations than those supposedly managing it.

Constantly Changing Requirements: The company has no clear direction. Requirements change daily, and managers only notify you at the last minute, leaving no time to adjust properly.

Very unrefined, authoritarian style of management. The executives are unsupportive and out of touch. They have an illogical way of how things should be done. The strive for overall improvement in operation and management is completely missing here. 

Wages are low. They are stingy and cut costs wherever possible. The hours are 6 days a week and  10 hours a day which is a way to make up for the low hourly rate.

Very poor coordination, with 5 places(in different spots in Richmond) and multiple assembly teams in each shop, they often have to wait for materials, parts, and drawings for hours due to traffic and other reasons.

The hardest part is striving for excellence, as there isn't an organized, standardized way to check drawings. Every designer has a slightly different style, so you have to know how to read and interpret the drawings. Even if you're careful, something could still go wrong, but the workers here have gotten used to it and know what to do with it.

There are often minor clashes between the design department and the shop, as they tend to disagree a lot. A few of the designers need some a*s kicking.

While people around you are likely to be friendly, the work can be a lot of frustration.

In terms of the company’s overall growth, definitely drastic changes from year to year, expansions and global offices, that’s a lot of integration happening all at once! Basically it’s a start-up company, phasing or developing into a larger corporation, messy at times.

My direct manager had been very supportive of my development and career goals. Had opportunities over the years in different roles. I had to take extended periods of leave for personal reasons, and they were understanding of that. Took the opportunity to build out my resume and network. Lots of learning on the job. The challenging part was no formal training program. It wasn’t a walk in the park, but definitely built my confidence with this experience to pursue my own business endeavours. 

Very friendly co-workers, built lasting relationships beyond the workplace

Appreciation giftcards from time to time, generous year-end bonus (of course depends on performance)

Colleagues that I work with are generally happy and caring. For the years that I have been here, the rate of growth has historically been crazy, keep hiring, never enough staff to keep up. It seems that the workload has been stabilizing for the last couple of years now (of course the pandemic threw things out of whack). I have been promoted a few times due to this growth. Many opportunities around, there's always challenges. I am quite content with my job.

If there are things I must pick at: There seems to be some disconnect between upper management and (relatively) newer employees. Please communicate better.

I think the business outlook is good, but so many things happening all at once, confused with the direction that things are going. Not that this affects my day-to-day work, I'm not worried about job security, just nice to know where things are headed as a big picture.

Working within the support group department, it feels like a big family. Supportive management team and gives good recognition. Feel valued for work completed. Management's demand is very fair and reasonable. Year-end bonus was a surprise and it was very generous.  

* typical day at work: busy fast pace
* what you learned: various processed and inter-department communication 
* management: open door policy, understanding, goal oriented, promote open communication & transparency
* workplace culture: value hard work & fun (work hard play hard mentality)

Top Job Titles	Average salary
Technologist 25 salaries reported	$62,000 per year
Accounting manager 13 salaries reported	$96,154 per year
Product specialist 14 salaries reported	$64,000 per year
Plc programmer 16 salaries reported	$74,375 per year
Mechanical designer 14 salaries reported	$61,143 per year

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