Ford

The pay is good, and the work environment is generally relaxed and cooperative. They have good benefits (e.g., maternity, 1 year on full pay!) and plenty of policies about work/life balance, with most managers being understanding and helpful in that regard.

This is a large organisation, with all the inertia that comes with that. Product development mostly deals in project management of suppliers who do almost all the real technical work. Management promotions depend on fitting a generic template, with no requirement to know anything about the work of the people you'll be managing.

If you're technically minded, you have to abandon that and subscribe to the management groupthink to progress, or you'll likely be under a management chain that has no idea what you actually do and has no interest in anything other than whether you've done it on time or not. It's a lot easier to judge whether a deadline is in the past than the quality of work you have no experience in yourself.

First-level management chain members rotate through positions every few years to develop their careers, so you usually spend a couple of years training your boss to understand the basics of your specific area, only for them to move on before they've done anything useful.

You need to understand what engineers do. More technical specialist positions at all levels are needed to balance the timing plan and address issues.

There are also list chasers.