Decent jobs, dead end careers - Anonymous employee ETC Employee Review

2.0
Jan 19, 2017
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Strong health insurance. Better coverage than almost anywhere Ive found. Informal work culture (very casual dress) Lots of wonderful, dedicated people work here. Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) is an added retirement benefit for most employees. Profit sharing through consistent (if modest) quarterly bonuses. A mission statement that ends with "Have fun and make money." For manufacturing, facilities, and admin positions, this is a great place to work. Good jobs, decent pay, on-the-job training, and a very low bar for entry-level skill requirements. Pay isn't anything spectacular for these hourly positions, but it isn't terrible and the strong benefits do compete well with other area employers. The CEO, Fred Foster, is revered by most everybody there, and for good cause; he's an exceptional guy with a great vision for the company and a big heart for his employees.

Cons

Generally low pay for professionals, by a significant amount. Lots of incompetent managers who are never sniffed out due to an entrenched top-down management philosophy. Culture of fear and retribution cultivated by the management/personal philosophies of the President and COO stifles innovation and dissuades people from taking initiative. Employees have almost no say in key decisions that will affect them; They are expected to "shut up and put up". Dissent, critical thinking, and independence are regularly ignored or punished. Pushing for rapid growth without prior preparation and investment has stretched many departments beyond their abilities, creating a stressful, almost vicious work environment where hastiness and lack of attention to detail dominates. Hierarchical management structure has rendered many managers powerless to reward good employees while nepotism and favoritism have consistently sheltered and promoted bad ones. HR is a department that wields CONSIDERABLE power and helps to breed the culture of retribution and fear. BEWARE. If you're in professional/salary-type work, or looking for a long-term career, this isn't the place for you. Salaries for professionals (engineers, project managers, IT, marketing, technical, accounting, etc.) are unjustifiably low for the area, especially considering the high expectations and low managerial support for salaried positions. As a result, a lot of mid- and low-level talent finds a permanent home here, which makes it a lot harder on those who take their jobs seriously. If advancement is your plan, forget it. True advancement opportunities are few and far between. Lots of transfers, but with only a few pay grades across all departments it's hardly "advancement" and somehow management uses your old salary as the starting point for your new, you're capped to a 5% raise or less at any time. The Peter Principle reigns supreme here; those who are promoted to their level of incompetence stay there and no amount of success, achievement, talent, accountability, or notoriety will get you to advance past them, that is, unless you're personally acquainted with or related to certain individuals near the top. If you're outspoken, unorthodox, question authority, or tend to swim against the stream, you'll be defeated at every step. Yes-persons do well here, especially those who shamelessly self-promote, lack accountability, and tend to blame underlings for their own incompetencies.

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Pros

Good work culture, learning resources, upward mobility

Cons

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CEO approval
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Pros

As LGBTQ+ friendly as you get. I am not among that group, but I have friends who are, and have worked with many others in that group in the past. This is a safe place for them. Department design manager was a great guy who I will miss.

Cons

Worked on Concert in the Networking department. They cut my contract short by 2 months because they did not feel that I was working well with some of the other engineers. That was always on them though. I documented the problems as they came up in the hopes that I may be able to fix things there someday. After 3 pages, I realized that there was no point. What started as a good experience went downhill quickly due to not being trusted to do my job by people who were thought they were doing the right thing with their chronic and massive obstruction. Project manager's ticket management was not good. I would have been more successful in a fraction of the time had he not even been there. Tech Lead was afraid of our own code. I was literally told, "there be dragons here" when all I saw were the bunnies which I brought back to life and completed implementation of (having been dead for at least a decade). Everything I looked at that they told me to be afraid of was junior engineer level C++. They thought it was so fragile that it shouldn't be touched. But much of it was broken and had to be fixed. So it got touched anyway. Being told I should be afraid of a piece of code when I just resurrected all the pieces of code around it was one of the indications that they really had no idea what I was dealing with or capable of. There were massive monolithic files that I couldn't split up because the PM had an anecdote that reorganizing features once caused a bug. Not being able to clean up, reorganize, or refactor existing code and being forced to do "minimal changes" for a massive new set of features added months to the implementation. The Test Manager's incessant requirement of new test versions for features that were not complete, wasted months of my time. Imagine having to crank out test versions on a major new set of features, weekly, that are usable for some kind of testing just because we had a surplus of testers with time on their hands. Every time I did that, it added 2-3 days to the schedule and this happened weekly, unless I pushed back and said "no". Which is one of the things that cost my my job. It was such an atrocious experience that I had been working on getting out of for the final 5 months I spent there but couldn't actually leave because I was stuck in a lease. When they cut my contract short, it was my happiest day of the year.

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