Pros
If you’re interested in energy efficiency or the utilities industry, you might learn a thing or two. You'll see a number of people on here mention "Flex Fridays", which were Fridays off if you had nothing pressing to take care of. It was nice while it lasted, but they rescinded this benefit earlier this year, despite productivity and performance staying the same. This perk was aggressively sold to new hires as something that makes the company great, and doing away with it was delivered to staff as a fairness move -- as apparently not everyone was able to take advantage of it. But, rather than finding a way to fix that, they thought it better to eliminate the benefit altogether, which was done in a blunt and passive aggressive manner by the CEO. He seemed annoyed he even had to explain himself. Presumably the new private fund owners didn’t like the idea of people working 4 days a week, from a potential profits and revenues perspective.
Cons
To succeed here, you'll need a fake smile and have to act like you enjoy the constant change, lack of direction, poor planning and execution of ideas -- not to mention the frequently inefficient way of doing things. Be a “yes man” or “yes woman”. The number of internal promotions given to people without the experience (and sometimes talent) to be managing others is surprising. There is a pervasive attitude of “this is just fine”, when quite clearly things are starting to unravel. People keep leaving or getting fired. But the show must go on and longer-term employees cling to the idea that this was once a good place to work. This makes for an uncomfortable atmosphere, where employees are very visibly frustrated in meetings but no one seems to care to do anything about it. You’ll also find the number of internal emails and meetings will slow you down. You’ll be cc’d into too many chains, out of a fear of poor communication. You'll be invited to any meeting tangentially related to your role and never told to make a judgment call on whether you should attend or asked if you have the time. The agenda for each meeting will be packed with ideas that just rolled off of someone’s brain without consideration of practicality or necessity. And you might have 2-4 of these meetings in a day but still be expected to get your actual job done on top of them. Management hasn't yet figured out that it's hard to stay focused and motivated when you're constantly being pulled into team meetings that 50% of the time you really don't need to attend. The frequent upending of systems and processes might also get to you. I heard the company has been through 7 re-orgs in 10 years (!), which really speaks for itself when you’re talking about a company that’s over 30 years old, and definitely not a start up. I think the reason this keeps happening is that whenever an approach to work or a business challenge is overhauled, it’s hastily replaced with a new way of doing things that’s half-baked and highly inefficient from a resources and appropriateness perspective. And is implemented by people who prefer to sit in meetings all day with each other, cooking up new approaches to do the same old thing. What someone else on here referred to as E Source's "entrenched management class." Finally, the firing of senior staff members immediately and with no explanation to the company other than a brief “we wish him/her all the best” is chilling to witness. It instills neither trust nor positivity in leadership. It just makes people feel their job is in constant jeopardy.
