EPAM Systems reviews

The company culture has been steadily degrading and is becoming toxic. Despite improving business results, leadership consistently refuses salary increases, hiding behind vague “unstable market conditions” - as if employees’ personal lives were somehow stable and immune to inflation. For years, people are fed with empty promises: “just wait a bit longer, things will improve.” They don’t. Workload keeps increasing, expectations rise, but compensation ьщыедн stays the same. Even though salaries are occasionally increased (roughly once every 2-3 years), the raises are negligible and do not even come close to covering inflation. In practice, this results in a real decrease in income over time. Employees are expected to deliver more, faster, and with fewer resources. New processes are constantly introduced for the sake of process itself, often disconnected from real project work and adding bureaucracy instead of value. There is a strong sense of chronic fatigue and burnout across teams. Wanting a fair salary increase is subtly framed as selfish or disloyal, creating a culture of guilt rather than trust. Senior leadership appears to treat employees as expendable resources to be squeezed until exhaustion and then replaced.

Your skills don't matter. I was told projects differ, but the one I was on was was terrifying. All the bells and whistles were there, under- or misused, engineers seemed to not even notice or understand why these were issues, and management did not care. There's a lot of politics. Have expectations or raise objections and it's a dead end for you. Your job as an engineer is to deliver and not raise objections. There's no real flexibility in choosing your project. I assigned to a project that was in most ways the opposite of what I like and have significant experience in. I got stuck there with the promise that maybe after a year, or rather two, there will be something more up my alley. You're flooded with watch-a-video-and-take-a-quiz trainings and talks held to tick off goals, there's no real learning opportunity if you're already skilled. Despite this, surprisingly, people are generally decent. But there are examples of very loud toxicity, racism, sexism which aren't dealt with, which causes the more decent people to close in, become silent. If you walk through the building, you'll notice how silent it is, and how people generally seem depressed and avoidant. There's diversity in hiring, you can get the job, but you will definitely be exposed to people who resent you for it. As usual in tech, people can be immature. The interview process is very streamlined, and the company will show its best face. Once you're in, HR is an ever-changing roster of young faces, your only contacts are 2-3 people, and their job is mostly explaining why there's nothing to be done, and if you try, you'll likely end up doing office politics. So this is the reality of it, you might find it negative, but it's important that if you go in you go in with the right expectations, and don't risk burnout. You're treated as a resource, and being replaced by AI is very much on the table. If you're an engineer and actually enjoy this field and care about your work, there's no sugarcoating it, you'll suffer. Many have turned bitter. If you're going along with times and looking for a paycheck, this can be a situation you can work to your advantage for a while.