ECP Group - This should be a case study in a business school textbook
Pros
* Work/life balance is good and usually don't work after hours unless on call. * Colleagues are friendly albeit don't talk to other ethnic groups much; tend to stick to their own cliques. * Managers are very supportive of their direct reports
Cons
* Massive exodus of senior leaders and top performers last summer. Everything was reorged and the leaders that took their place made increasingly poor management decisions. They did not inspire or establish a vision or goal. Everyone saw through their forced optimism. * Worst silo'd teams I have ever seen in my career. Seriously, this was even worse than a case study I read in business school. Work was often doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in some cases. People sitting 10ft away would never speak about what they were doing design wise and other teams would flat out refuse to collaborate. * Common to have production outages due to the most abysmal IAM I have ever seen. * The most tedious and complicated CM system I have ever seen. Someone's job is literally to fill out CM. No, I am not joking. * This is a MASSIVE H1b shop. That's not a problem, many companies do it and do it well see: Apple, Facebook, or Google. However, this office is probably ~90% H1b's. Just keep in mind the cultural differences may make it difficult to build friendships or report. * Contractors are commonplace here. Management is unable to get FTEs (see below). * Compensation is quite below average for the area. If you are going to be in Palo Alto and not be a sexy startup, you need to pay high salary or bonuses. You are competing with FB, GOOG, NFLX, and AMZN. Talented engineers are turning down positions here due to compensation. This leaves management to hire the bottom performers. I do not believe this org has a "bar" or if they have one it is pretty low. * Managers/Directors would go behind your back to skip levels if you disagreed with their designs or requests. * Managers/Directors only want to prove their worth to their manages/directors. No semblance of a unified vision or direction. Everyone is out for themselves. * Documentation is sparse, incomplete, and out of date. You will be lucky for someone to even leave a comment about a library function. * Rats fall out of the ceiling (actually happened).