Good company with honorable values, a few shortfalls - Anonymous employee ETC Employee Review

4.0
Jun 2, 2022
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

ETC exists as a company for and by each employee, and it really shows. Lots of very talented, caring, and dedicated people work here. Refreshing lack of management speak and corporate BS. Be yourself in the building and enjoy healthy work/life balance. You will not be fearful of sabotage or retaliation by coworkers. Amazingly, it just isn’t done. Very functional relationships between different parts of the company, in comparison to many others of its size. Disagreements are resolved professionally and with the customer or other greater good in mind. You can find a lot of rope to take on responsibility and do fulfilling work with a direct impact. Bonuses based on quarterly profit are nice, though modest. Benefits are good. ETC serves its markets well and remains a leader in the industry. Production, aftermarket services, IT, HR, marketing, engineering, finance, and food service generally being onshore and in-house makes for a very engaging place to work. Love what you do and be excited to tell people about it.

Cons

The company focus on accommodating employees is occasionally taken too far. Perennial under-performers are rarely addressed. From the company mission to “listen to customers and give them more than they expect, develop great new products and services, have fun and make money,” there is a contingent that only heard the last phrase, and maybe just the “have fun” part. Certain departments are held to different standards than others. Systemic failure (or even just the perception of failure) might prompt executive attention in one department, but in another one be explained away with shadowy reasoning. Salaries range from somewhat competitive to poor depending on location. They are not exceptional. Appetite for new products is unrelenting and very broad, spreading everyone thin. Strong hesitance to formalize, document, or revise processes, causing inefficiencies, errors, and frustration. Little room for advancement beyond a few levels within existing role.

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5.0
Apr 14, 2026
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Pros

Good work culture, learning resources, upward mobility

Cons

None off top of my head

1.0
Jun 26, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

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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