Pluspunten
Starkey is stable and makes money. Many people have worked most if not all of their careers here, and they could certainly do worse. It's family oriented. Literally. It seems like husband/wife or father/son working at Starkey is quite common. It seems like a great environment if your background is audiology or digital signal processing or RF engineering especially if you have an advanced degree in one of those disciplines. The company is conservatively managed so they weathered the 2008 recession reasonably well. Pay and benefits are competitive. The revenue sharing plan is a nice recent addition. EP is a large campus with decent amenities including two cafeterias. The hiring process is pretty strong so there are very few bad employees.
Minpunten
On some projects, processes are weak. Multi-million dollar projects are kicked off with documentation lacking. It seems in some instances Starkey doesn't understand or doesn't believe that the earlier you find defects the cheaper it is to fix them. Creating documents with an adequate level of detail and then reviewing them with the appropriate people is a good way to identify these problems early. Key projects/products have been outsourced, creating a void of knowledge among those that maintain the product. Outsourcing results have been disappointing, ending up with significant development still performed in-house. Short grey cubicles made out of cheap countertop material - made in-house for some reason. In many areas these cubes are crammed so close together that only one person can walk the aisle between them. There's virtually no place to store your technical books so they get left at home. The revenue sharing is definitely nice, but not always equitable. What I mean is that you are much better off if you contribute a little to every program release than if you contribute heavily to one program release only. The formula that is used will cap the amount given to an individual for any one program release. This means someone who works on an 18-month project will get a bonus only for that program release and it is very likely to be capped. Another employee who works on 3 6-month programs may put in the same level of effort in those 18 months, but will receive 3 smaller bonuses totaling more than the first employee's bonus because they never hit the cap. The 401k/ESOP match is given in company stock. This is not ideal because the company is private (i.e. the stock price changes once a year) and because you end up having too much invested in one company. You depend on Starkey for a paycheck and now you depend on Starkey for investment returns (and the hearing aid industry is likely slow growth). I'd rather have the 401k/ESOP match under my control to invest somewhere else. Starkey is not going to end up like Enron, but you get the general idea of why you want to diversify. New employees must also wait a long time before they are eligible to even participate with their own contributions - sometimes up to a year. Vacation time is good but not as generous as it sounds because Starkey observes fewer holidays than most companies - 6 versus 8-10 in some places.