chemical engineer

mechanical engineer

laboratory technician

chemical operator

process engineer

Eastman Chemical

This is a review of life at the plant and not reflective of the headquarters or overall corporate vibe. The plant was almost fully disconnected from the main headquarters location with little corporate influence. There has been some management change since I left, so it is my hope that things have changed for the positive. 

I started my career as a process engineer at the Indian Orchard plant. 

I thoroughly enjoyed the project and process work I was assigned: running trials, coordinating with QC lab, root cause analysis on quality upsets, incremental process improvements, learning how to run a day to day manufacturing unit, helping with safety protocols (lock out/tag out). 

The operators were a great bunch with a wide range of personalities and were caring people. They cared about teaching me the process and how to manage it. I learned a lot around how to work with people, ensure the job was getting done, and build credibility. 

Great people on the engineering teams who truly care about doing the right thing and served as amazing mentors. 

The management team taught me everything I never want to be. Many tended to be ladder climbers and uninterested in true people development. People development was considered as moving people from one department to others in involuntary lateral moves. Often, people would be thrown under the bus or micromanaged by those wishing to promote themselves at any cost. Much of my working life felt like an ongoing soap opera that had the rollercoaster highs and lows. Managers took credit for work others completed and often did not acknowledge the help of others. 

Once leaving the plant and moving to another company, I realized that while all companies have politics, the amount of insanity that happened at this plant was not normal. When you go to a normal company, you can truly be respected by management teams who care about their people all the way down to the plant level.

This was an incredible learning experience for me in all ways and taught me how to be a better engineer and person. It also made me appreciate the next company I worked for and the amount of transparency and integrity that is possible. 

When I was first hired on with Eastman, I was so excited.  If you are going to live in this area, this is THE employer to work for.  I quickly discovered they are not quite the company they used to be.  In previous generations, people knew if they went to work for Eastman and worked hard, they would be with the company for an entire career and would be taken care of.  This is no longer the case.  I watched people who had been with the company 20+ years forced into early retirement because they didn't have a degree (because Eastman told them they didn't need one).  They send all the experience and knowledge out the door to bring in a new group of people with a piece of paper.  (I was one of those people with a piece of paper so I'm not really complaining.)  They company is just not loyal to employees who have been loyal to them.  


I found myself working in a group for five years, feeling like I had given everything I could in this position and was ready to look for other positions within the company.  When I discussed a transfer with my supervisor, all of the sudden there were issues with my performance and I needed to be placed on an improvement plan.  That made me ineligible to post internally for another position.  The incidents used to place me on an improvement plan were things that happened 3-4 months prior and were blown entirely out of proportion. In my opinion, it was a personal attack because my new supervisor (there were 5 in the 5 year period) simply did not like me.  I had refused to complete a task she asked me to do (because it violated our policies) and she never treated me the same.  Things got worse every day until I was actually having panic attacks. I would sit at my desk and cry daily. As I was trying to work with my doctor to get a medication I could take while working that would keep my nerves calm, I was laid off.  

That lay off was the best thing the company ever did for me.  We actually had a SharePoint site where we had to list safety observations.  I had made a posting about poor mental health caused by work stress being a safety risk.  They removed my post.

Typical work day started with searching information (SharePoint sites, email, texts, etc.) outlets and reviewing longer range plans to determine focus and where progress needs to be made.  You will typically have multiple focuses depending on your job responsibilities.  Responding to emergencies is not the norm, but you must be rearrange if they happen.  Diligence is a prized attribute on most jobs. 
From an Information Technology perspective, they are attempting shifting from a project team-oriented atmosphere to more of a small task-oriented team approach with the hope of increasing identifiable project milestone completions.  Because of the overall aging workforce and the hunger for new ideas, they can sometime over value to contribution of younger workers.
I have learned to "get out of the way" when a direction has been set, or a decision has been made.  I like the desire of management to be inclusive from a diversity perspective, but they still have a very long way to go.  The initial focus will be on women, and others will follow depending on the outcome of this effort.
The workplace culture is good, and your performance is often difficult to gage because you have so many groups doing evaluations with their own individual scales.  Sometimes determining how to reach a goal is difficult because it is so different depending on your team assignment.
The hardest part of the job is knowing when to be outspoken, and when to keep quiet.  If you are outspoken at the wrong time, you will be marginalized.  If you don't speak at the right time, you will be trivialized.  The right balance is essential depending on the audience and their overall view of you.
The most enjoyable part of the job was learning and implementing new technology to help the company become more efficient.  I had the opportunity to work on some great efforts with a lot of great people.

When I started in IT at Eastman 7 years ago it was an amazing environment with a great starting salary and even better management who genuinely cared about your personal, and career development. Developers were provided with advancement opportunities and were encouraged to explore new roles that interested them. Today you will only be offered new opportunities if you are mediocre at your job and deemed non-essential (hence the poor management), or if the new CIO's latest big idea involves something you are very good at. Over the past 3 years, Eastman IT laid off the majority of employees who had been with the company 30+ years, resulting in a drought of subject matter experts and piles of technical debt. You will be offered a position doing a certain job but on your first day there is a 90% chance you will be doing something completely different which you may not enjoy, and there is little chance of changing roles. Younger employees naive enough to stay (me) are overworked because of demands that the many, many layers of IT Management will not say no to. IT decisions are driven by managers outside of IT who read an article about some new technology or paid a consulting firm tens of thousands of dollars for their poor opinion on the subject.  This is the second year I have been at Eastman that we have been denied raises (better than the pay CUTS in 2009) because of the company's financial performance; meanwhile the CEO uses one of Eastman's private jets to travel back and forth between Kingsport and his home in Florida every week. Your offer letter will seem enticing, but the future is bleak. Many of the people I expected to be lifetime Eastman employees (some of the best) are now looking for other jobs. At the very least use an Eastman IT position as an entry point and job-hop out as soon as you can (that seems to work well for the folks in India that Eastman has outsourced many IT jobs to).

Overall Eastman in Longview has a great company culture with supportive and kind coworkers and a good understanding of work-life balance. However, the department head/director tier of management is very weak. Some have terrible boundaries, some are ignorant, some are are useless, some are just plain bad people. All of this is creating a toxic culture of fear across the operating areas since they have the most impact on day-to-day operations. Retention of engineers in the 2-10 year experience range has been terrible because of this (though also because of location). 

They also move engineers around like pawns with little to no regard for their preferences, which is another reason promising engineers leave. Each plant is very insular, so if you're moved to another one where you don't have any connections against your will, there's nothing really keeping you at the company. Especially if you can move to Houston to do the same job with a higher salary. 

As for positives, most of upper management seems competent and thoughtful with a few notable exceptions (including the current CEO, though I don't expect him to be around for much longer). Methanolysis would've been a great opportunity for the site, but Eastman couldn't have done much about the loss of the DOE grant. Company tries to stay resilient and does minimal layoffs, which is appreciated. Pay/benefits are very fair, though I've heard it doesn't scale well after 10+ years of experience unless you are in management. HSE is very important to the company. 

I would recommend people work here since it's generally a great workplace, though their experience will vary greatly depending on which department/operating area they are assigned and who's in charge. Some are significantly more chaotic or have higher workloads than others. 

Eastman is a good company to work for overall. I am a operator at the Longview Texas location. Eastman pay is good for the area but well below what comparable companies such as BP, Exxon, or even smaller companies such as EnBridge pay their employees. Eastman health insurance for people hired post 2010 is a JOKE. Super high deductibles, a person with a family will most assuredly be better off purchasing at the least supplemental health insurance or getting insurance on their own all together. They try and sell you on a flex spending account but it is just your money any way so why bother. Then they have you jumping through hoops all year to qualify for $600 incentives on you $6000 family annual deductible. As far as work schedule they try and sell you on a 14 day per month worked on swing shifts. You end up being forced into more overtime than you want. Forget about holidays because you will be working every one. Yes every Christmas, thanksgiving, ect. Then you have "shutdowns" 12 hours a day seven days a week for months at a time. Those are scheduled every two or three years and emergency shutdowns happen at any time. I have averaged one per year so far. If the below par pay, poor health care, and over worked schedule don't get you the politics will. As an operator you are a second rate citizen, engineers run the place and with out the engineering degree you might as well be a burger flipper in their eyes. Favoritism is rampant and advancement is not possible unless you know the right person. That usually does not matter because female employees will always be promoted over male employees ( not an exaggeration, policy). Operators average 80k after 4 years if you can accept the cons for the money you'll do fine.

I work in the Eastman Films division, specifically rewind, the last stop for products before going out to customers. I was lied to about the job I was hired for during on boarding and didn’t find out until my training actually started, then was told I would have to prove myself to get the job I was hired for, and this has happened to almost every single employee I have met that was hired since I have started. Management pushes safety until it conflicts with your quotas and then demands more of you, such as expecting us all to come in during a Tornado warning then giving us a 1.5 hour lecture on safety for slips trips and falls a couple days later. Management will lie to you, manipulate you and push you to produce while telling you they care about you and your success. All that while ignoring your requests to test to advance your pay and potential to get higher positions. Of course, unless you are friends with the managers, then you’ll be offered higher positions and specifically told to apply for them. This place is a bigger joke every day I show up. Also if you work in rewind be prepared for constant mandatory overtime 12 hour shifts where you’re told every day to make sure you get good rest despite having barely enough time to eat and bathe while still getting enough sleep between endless shifts. You will be used, talked down to and treated poorly in almost every way here, do not recommend for anyone.

Eastman Chemical Company was formed when Eastman Kodak's Photographic Division decided to separate from the Chemical Division. Once the separation of companies was final, my employment continued with Eastman Chemical Company.

My responsibilities included process and product development, process improvement, troubleshooting, benchmarking, quality control, quality evaluation and many other faucets in efforts to produce the highest valued products. Cost reductions of products were sought by Eastman on many of its products to maintain favorable customer satisfaction. Development efforts to cut processing costs were one of the highest priority resulting in considerable underpinning work to optimize every phase of processing.

Ultimately, Eastman Chemical Company received the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award through these efforts. These accomplishments were obtained through the many efforts of employees who worked together in a team environment to attain and maintain the highest quality products throughout the chemical industry.

Eastman Chemical Company decided to move away from specialty and performance chemicals which was primarily produced at its Arkansas facility. Eastman, therefore, agreed to sell the Arkansas facility to several investors who wanted to utilize this plant site to concentrate on biofuels as a major investment opportunity.

I was generally happy at Eastman, but I found that employee interactions were often separate from management involvement. I found this to be a hindrance in early career development. With no structured mentor program, it was a toss-up whether a new employee would settle into a role within the organization. Fitting in would result from a good employee/mentor pairing, while isolation could just as easily result from a bad pairing. Mid-level management always seemed willing to invest in employee training, but seemed very uninterested in workflow management. High-level management, on the other hand, seemed content to use the existing employees and capital resources to the utmost with minimal reinvestment. I found the culture to be inadequate, and often contradictory. While the tagline suggested an environment of cooperation and mentoring, a rating system shifted the focus to competition. While the company spoke of a culture of internal innovation, it shifted heavily into mergers and acquisitions during my time there. While it touted principles of diversity, it has made only meager, if any, progress in enhancing workplace diversity and inclusion.

The culture is built upon checking off boxes, job security is not there. Management announces for people to stop having unnecessary meetings, the result was an increase in unnecessary meetings. Job description that I was hired for changed after a few years, drastically, the goalposts were constantly moved further back.
The CRM system Salesforce.com is an excellent big brother tool, SFDC is good if used in probably in half of the applications .However Eastman is overly committed to SFDC, whereby you become a SFDC writer/programmer. Many people have SFDC meetings to justify their existence. I recall learning new systems with SFDC, only in a years time to never hear or use those applications ever again.

My supervisor, was highly critical, and a very difficult person to deal with, this person was highly knowledgeable, and wanted you to know it. This person would ask me in detail a question, that would be answered with 5 or so sentences. Then my supervisor would go back to sentence number one, and ask me to elaborate. Meetings because frustrating and stressful. 
I had many positives with Eastman, I enjoyed engaging with  many of my co-workers, and before COVID met with them in person, I would say those meetings were positive.
 
 

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Chemical engineer 15 salaries reported	$97,240 per year
Mechanical engineer 3 salaries reported	$99,667 per year
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Chemical operator 2 salaries reported	$28.59 per hour
Process engineer 6 salaries reported	$122,833 per year

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