Drink the Kool Aid - Project Manager II ETC Employee Review

1.0
Jul 30, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

They have a nice facility and there are some great people there. Company history is rich but a shift in direction with the new generation of leadership seems evident so beware, not is all what it seems to be.

Cons

If nepotism, cronyism, and gaslighting were Olympic sports, ETC would win the gold. Great until it’s not, at least in the Project Management world at ETC. Turnover in this department has been horrendous and 95% of the PMs have been there for only about 2-3 years, which seems to be the point where people either burnout or fall out of favor and get constructively dismissed through a false PIP. In my roughly 3 year tenure there I’ve watched the same pattern unfold to two previously well performing colleagues only to became a victim of it myself. I’ve heard stories about others as well. I was always given stellar annual performance reviews where I was deemed to be exceeding expectations and performing the functions of my job well only to then apparently fall out of favor suddenly where I was then accused of having never performed my job well in the first place and then I was placed on a PIP. The initial reason I was given for being placed on the PIP was for a vague customer complaint that I was apparently not allowed to know any details of. This was followed by a list of supposed examples of poor performance as related to the projects I managed. When I presented the full summaries of evidence including emails, screenshots, and other documents all of which completely contradicted their accusations, the info was ignored, I was accused of being argumentative, and with every week that followed new and made up accusations were made by my manager and HR to keep my PIP a moving target. The PIP was obviously never intended to improve performance because my performance had been satisfactory anyway and all my projects were in good standing. The PIP was obviously used primarily as a paper trail to try and justify dismissing me without me being entitled to my unemployment benefits. This was also used as a personal attack on me meant to defame my professional reputation. I hold a bachelor’s of science in Business Management and have been a PMP certified project manager working in the world of lighting and controls for over a decade. I recommend that if you work at ETC that you document every aspect of your work including your daily tasks and communications, all performance reviews, all conversations and notes from meetings with management, and video and audio record all meetings with management as the law allows. Backup all this information and save it for a rainy day. Benefits aren’t great and compensation could be better. If you seek diversity look anywhere else. Nice place to work if you’re married to, related to, went to the same school as, or play golf with members of management.

Explore other reviews about ETC

5.0
Apr 14, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

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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