I accepted a job offer last year at a manufacturing plant as a controls engineer, with the understanding that it would be a regular office schedule of 9 AM – 5 PM with rotating on-call once every six weeks. Organizational changes happened, and my team was reduced to 4 people, meaning I would be on-call once every four weeks. Then, the department on the floor (operations) requested our help to support their shifts. Shifts are for 12 hrs, 6 to 6.
We did that for a year, with breaks in-between, and the promise was that we would finish shift support and return to on-call after the project ended and “regular” production started. This was to make sure the software could handle almost everything on its own, and to intervene in case it did weird shit (which it did at the beginning). Well, the project ended, regular production started, but we are still forced to support their shifts. There is no end in sight for us. What's crazier is that we have a different team set up specifically for “shift support” – my team's role is not to babysit the process, but instead to make process improvements and fix the weird shit that comes up during production.
I'm just very disappointed at life as an engineer in manufacturing. I would quit/switch companies, but my 401k hasn't vested yet, and I still have a lease that lasts until July 2024… also, I'm still making payments on my car…
Let's just say morale in my team is super low rn. My boss' hands are tied because the decision to have us on-site supporting their shifts is coming from one of the plant's bigwigs, even though we could do all of this remotely