Cool work but watch out for management - Anonymous employee ETC Employee Review

Good work culture, learning resources, upward mobility

None off top of my head

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.

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.