Great work, great place, awesome projects, very bright future - Software Developer Egen Employee Review

its a good company to work for

there is a lot of pressue

friendly during interview, especially L1/L2 engineers and non-technical leadership. great pay. good benefits at first - taken away later. bench system - 2 months to find new project before full layoff.

I had the unfortunate pleasure of working for Egen for roughly 3 months before I was laid off due to circumstances outside my control. The interview process was 8 rounds, during which time I became quite acquainted with most of my future teammates - all of whom seemed quite friendly. 2 months and one signed offer letter later, onboarding quickly painted a very different picture. I could tell immediately that the company was extremely disorganized and poorly run - when asking questions about the stack we worked on or main objectives with the client, I was given multiple highly conflicting answers by leadership. Additionally, several "Lead/Principal" engineers (there were 3 engineers on my team alone so definitely major title inflation) were extremely hostile towards me during my time here - asking very odd personal questions seemingly to try intimidating me, gatekeeping information, and all around being extremely rude. Only a small handful of folks on my team were genuinely helpful during onboarding and as a result of this toxic culture + an extremely overengineered tech stack (the Leads on the team were extremely opinionated about individual devs' terminal setup/editor we used... seriously?) they had designed seemingly to keep the client stuck with us for the foreseeable future with very little chance of off-boarding, it took me quite a while (roughly 4 weeks) just to get a decent understanding of the codebase and have it run semi-functionally on my machine. My laptop also was obviously setup wrong before it was mailed to me, as I experienced frequent network errors and no one else on the team had - making it extremely difficult to get any real work done. For the most part any time I asked questions I was met with either non-answers or extreme hostility from devs above me (I remember one time a gentleman overtly told me 'questions are fine once you prove your worth as an engineer', as if I somehow owed him something... very odd behavior. less than a week later I saw him rushing to help a female engineer who'd just started at the company on a completely different team who was facing similar issues getting started because her codebase was so brittle and docs were lacking - and in fact I saw a lot of this sort of race/religious/gender-based favoritism, which was very concerning) and was forced to rely on L1 engineers to get any form of help/guidance with understanding the stack. Because of this, obviously I fell behind pretty quickly with deliverables - circumstances I'd made pretty clear to my "mentor" and PM (which they both said was understandable and offered any help they could give). However, less than a week after telling my mentor I was experiencing trouble getting up to speed with the codebase due to confusing documentation + lack of support from technical leadership, I was removed from the project + benched. Obviously, his offer to "speak my mind" was just a veiled attempt to get me to make myself look worse + secure work for himself - which he did by stealing my slot on the team less than 2 weeks later. For the next ~2 months while on bench, I watched the slow-moving train wreck that was this extremely poorly run organization unfold - they took away several of our benefits, reduced the quality of healthcare offered, and began laying off several engineers under the guise of "efficiency gains " -- all while increasing headcount of offshore engineers in India. To be clear, I have zero issue with offshore engineers in India as they're obviously just trying to support themselves. What I do take issue with is a company who gaslights/mistreats its employees this blatantly while telling them "everything is fine" + replacing them with cheap labor that can't say No as easily. Roughly 1 month into being benched, I was interviewed by one of these offshore managers for a position on a new project. At this point I was pretty much completely checked out from the job due to the extremely poor treatment and didn't take the interview very seriously. Naturally, I was not given the job and a few weeks later I was informed I would be laid off. I'd hoped this would've been the end of my story with them, but of course, they found a way to scam me even harder - while filing my taxes the following year, it became clear that someone from the company had gone out of their way to completely remove my paystubs + tax forms from their internal systems, seemingly in an effort to make it seem like I'd never worked there and presumably so they could dodge/skirt taxes. I came to find, while trying to hand-derive my taxable income they'd paid me + being blown off/given bogus excuses by the HR rep who I'd contacted for my tax/payroll info, that the main corporate entities for this company are dispersed throughout several states, organized in a very clear shell company structure routing through high-privacy states such as Delaware + Ireland -- seemingly to dodge legal/tax liability. tl;dr: if this company reaches out to you for work, run for the hills.