Don't Believe the Hype - Web Applications Engineer Illuminate Education Employee Review

Where do I begin? To start, there was no onboarding process, though that is said to have changed since my time. They sat me down, gave me a project on day one, to learn the lumbering framework, and while I did complete my task, never really got to dig in to the framework much. Technical Debt is incredibly high in this company. Their student information system is a very HUGE system, and the framework was originally created by them, with some of the original developers still working there. When I worked there, they were using an End of Life version of PHP, and the developers would have arguments over upgrading to a version that was 2 months from end of life. Furthermore, when trying to figure out the process behind the technical decisions, asking questions and then expressing your experience caused many of the development staff to say I was "a know-it-all". Infighting with development staff is common, but because of the length of working relationships they were able to resolve quickly, but when a new employee joins, the development staff would have a hard time expressing their issues with the employee. Trying to get people to meet on a regular basis would require aggressive scheduling and forcing scrum conventions (at the time) was way too hard. It would be nice to have a way to learn what everyone is doing, show what you're working on, and get help for the things you need help with. Most of the developers work in "silo-ed" conditions. Developer support is non-existent. The "developer of the day" is an revolving engineering position to help the support staff, however, it usually means that the engineer is required to figure out who "owns" the issue (or module that the issue is with). Additionally, support staff wouldn't search to see if an existing ticket was created, and attach to that, so you would have two developers (or more) fielding tickets and working on the same issue, committing code to the same file. Most of the "executive level" staff are not in the office everyday, with the CEO going on sales calls, and the COO just not at the office. The CTO would be present during his developer of the day duties, but gone for the rest of the week. The only full-time executive that would be in the office would be the CFO. The implementation managers all act like they are in a constant party. One even began to hit on me until I mentioned being newly married, which then caused them to lose interest in the conversation. During my time, there was an incident where the implementation staff got drunk before boarding an airplane, wearing Illuminate Education shirts, which resulted in an email from an executive of Crunchbase to the CEO. The CEO brushed off the email as if it were nothing. Finally, if you can't tell from their team page, but nepotism is HUGE in this company. Your background doesn't matter, it's who you know. While they are trying to support families, the work-life balance and compensation are horrible. Approaching someone about the issues is difficult, because of people working from home. Furthermore, working from home would be something taken away if the management staff didn't feel you were "worthy" of it.