Pros
Easy commute to work in the Skagit Valley outside Burlington, WA. Satisfaction knowing your work is providing quality vegetable seed to seed companies, growers, farmers providing food for people to eat. A few great people with great knowledge and personality work here, and are a pleasure to learn from and work with. A place that was once great, and still has potential for the future.
Cons
Massive wastefulness of time and resources. Poor scheduling and vastly under-qualified leadership who lack skills and job efficiency at most levels in many departments. Promised opportunities for promotion are not made available and secretly given to unqualified individuals whose families are friends with those in management, as favors. No attention to fully training full time or seasonal help, resulting in throwing bodies at tasks that require knowledge. When those individuals quit, the surviving workers have to pick up the slack for 3 positions worth of work, leading to working 7 days a week 10-12+ hours a day for very low pay by industry standards. This schedule is maintained for 6 months, with most of the rest of year similar. People get ill and are expected to work regardless, temp workers will be fired summarily in these situations. Leadership in under-payed as well, and completely unmotivated. Don't expect to see your boss for days or even weeks at a time as they are in hiding behind desks or telecommuting, frequently on vacation during the busiest times of year. Processes, tasks and paperwork are legion and management is not proactively involved, only showing their faces when a huge problem that could reflect on them and their career arises due to their personal and organizational neglect. Paperwork grows every few months to the degree that it crowds out getting the actual work done and leading to longer hours more months of the year. Suddenly, one full task involving two units of production leads to 50+ pieces of paperwork, each of which must be signed in multiple places by specific people who do not have time to in-depth check each process, yet are required to, and are held responsible for any problems. Along with other companies long-established in the seed industry, Sakata Seed is seemingly rushing headlong into a death spiral of declining productivity and employee retention that may destroy profitability unless the organizational decay is checked rapidly. Sadly, a very sick unethical work culture whose leadership is cannibalizing what was once a great company and place to work producing meaningful products.