They certainly weren't the greatest, but I did some fillet welds for a previous employer. I thought they turned out pretty good, but they were not tested. The plan was to do the work outside. We started the job with the SMAW, but finished with a spool gun. We were told that the rods cost too much?
We learned the hard way that once we opened the plastic on that pack of five rods, we couldn't weld with them the next day-
at all.
We didn't do anything by a code there, at least until the Coast Guard had had enough.
Management also used to tell us that since we had a state OSHA we'd never be fined--they learned everything the hard way. I could tell some stories about that place.....