Not as employee centric as they think they are - Anonymous employee ETC Employee Review

2.0
6 Apr 2022
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- The Middleton location is an interesting building. The central hub called "Town Square" is made to look like several Edward Hopper paintings. Look up pictures if you're curious. The new addition is also similarly interesting. - The Deli serves reasonably priced hot meals, though it was hit hard by the pandemic. - With few exceptions, excellent people work here. - Decent to okay work/life balance depending on where you work. - Benefits are good, though have gotten progressively worse. - In "normal" times, yearly raises and quarterly bonuses.

Cons

- Management ranges from excellent to comically inept, like Michael Scott from The Office bad. - Upward mobility is hard to impossible. Raises are similarly stingy. Bonuses are nice, but not very large. - Working harder is not rewarded. If you end up working here in a salaried position, do not work OT unless asked. You won't see anything from it except extra stress. - Pay is well below industry averages for most positions, even for the area. - The pandemic hit the company's bottom line hard, and they're struggling. I'm not sure how much is due to the nature of being attached to the live event industry or just mismanagement. This has caused management to take a hyper conservative approach to everything which is driving people away. - Part shortages have started to stretch some departments past their breaking point. - Many "mandatory" attempts at boosting moral, which end up being tone deaf and have the opposite effect. - There seems to be a culture of toxic positivity among management and HR. - HR is pretty disconnected from the rest of the company. - There's a culture of "do it fast" regardless of quality. There's been initiatives to fix this, but they've changed little. - A large cultural vacuum was left with the former CEO, Fred's passing. The current CEO's approach is sober minded and business focused which I understand but it isn't what makes ETC ETC.

Explore other reviews about ETC

5.0
14 Apr 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good work culture, learning resources, upward mobility

Cons

None off top of my head

1.0
26 Jun 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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