Pluspunten
Good work-life balance. Great people. Lots of room for improvement.
Minpunten
I’ve rewritten this review multiple times over the last several months because I wanted to make sure that it was fair and not unduly motivated by emotion. After all that, I decided not to post it…until two things happened. First, ECi failed to pay the five thousand dollars it agreed to pay me if I resigned. Second, it threatened to take legal action against me if I posted defamatory comments online (which I still have no intention of doing). As part of my offer to leave professionally (quickly, quietly, without hassle), my supervisor said he would allow me to leave with pay for the last two weeks so I could look for a new job. I did exactly what I said I would do, but the company refused to pay my final paycheck. When I inquired, HR asked, “Why would we do that?” How about because you said you would? I consider myself a reasonable, conflict-averse person, but these latest actions have left me no viable alternative than to make a public statement. I feel it a moral obligation to share my experience with would-be employees and encourage them NOT to work at ECi. In the spirit of balance, I know there are some good people at ECi … people I still care about. Further, I make no pretense of being perfect. I’ve made mistakes. Unfortunately for ECi, none of these come close to warranting termination – “voluntary” resignation to be exact. If anything, I believe they say more about the company than they say about me. I’ve decided to focus on the two most egregious items my supervisor cited as cause for termination. They also happen to demonstrate cross-departmental issues, so the reader can rest assured that I am not merely reporting on the dysfunction in the department in which I worked. The problems at ECi are pervasive – more so than I can possibly detail here. Suffice it to say that the company is deeply troubled and highly resistant to change. There is a real risk that anyone trying to effect positive change at this company will encounter strong, even punitive opposition. You may very well find yourself playing the role of a scapegoat as I did. INCIDENT #1: Hardware Upgrades The first incident I’d like to discuss was my involvement in procuring new hardware for my team - which led to an incidental charge back to my business unit. One of the first things I noticed after starting at ECi is that my developers had old, inadequate, and unstable hardware. In response, I decided, as my first act, to contact IT and see if I could arrange some upgrades. IT was, at least initially, combative. Because laptops were out of the question given ITs very restricted budget, I toned down the request by opting for desktops over laptops. After a series of back and forth conversations spanning two months (emphasis), IT finally agreed to update two items in the desktops: 1) top off the RAM at 32GB to support the running of multiple virtual machines (VMware servers weren’t an option due to internal political and budgetary constraints) and 2) add a 500GB primary SSD hard drive. Regarding the SSD drives, these are and have been for some time, standard issue. My 15-year-old son’s, six-year-old laptop has one! Beyond RAM and SSD drives, I also asked the IT rep about the possibility of getting a third monitor for my developers. IT had a bunch of used 24” monitors laying around and agreed to send me those. Because these were already purchased assets, I had no cause to believe that there was a cost associated with reissuing them. They did, however, end up showing on the bill. The important point is that at no point did IT show or send me an invoice. Given the modest upgrades and how much time elapsed since I’d started bartering (begging?) for upgraded hardware, it never crossed my mind that the expense of the five systems would be billed back to my business unit. Even if it had, the amount was nominal ($2,000 at most). The worst part, though, is that I had every reason to believe that my supervisor was on board with my attempts to acquire decent hardware for my team. He cited multiple reasons for why it was a good thing: 1) a morale boost from the company saying to its developers, “You’re worth it!” 2) the incentive to work from home due to subpar work hardware was diminished, and 3) the cost being trivial as the hardware was amortized over three years for tax purposes. I had mentioned to him how it made no sense to me that we pay people tens of thousands of dollars a year, but are unwilling to spend a thousand on hardware over three years, especially as they use it every day as their primary tool of the trade. He seemed to agree. Further, before the bill arrived, when I mentioned that IT had agreed to the upgrades as a huge win, he smiled and agreed. There was no hint of an objection at any point…until the bill arrived. At that point, a previously undisputed victory did a 180 and became a cause for termination. All I did was give my best effort to get my team members the tools they needed to do their jobs every day. I even offered to pay the bill. That gesture made no difference. INCIDENT #2: Service Outage A peer repeatedly expressed concern that he was the only one who could package up builds and send them to IT for deployment. Trying to make a difference and develop a positive relationship with him, I offered to help if he would show me how. I followed his instructions to the letter. Unfortunately, he forgot to tell me about one change. That mistake cascaded into a service outage and, ultimately, the loss of three customers. However one might choose to interpret what happened, objectively, the bulk of the responsibility rests with the peer and IT person who upgraded the service – especially IT. Rather than rolling back the deployment, or at least notifying someone that the service was down, the IT person went home and left the failed deployment in place overnight! I don’t blame the peer as his omission was an honest mistake. In my career, I’ve seen myriad such mistakes from any number of qualified individuals -- none of which resulted in an outage. At prior companies, we had load balancers fronting multiple instances of a service and upgraded them one at a time. In addition, we always checked the services thoroughly post-deployment before exposing them to customers. Not only was an outage completely unnecessary in this instance, I’ve never heard of someone being let go because they botched a deployment, especially when it was their first attempt and they were supervised by a more experienced peer. Failure to verify the integrity of a service after an upgrade and going home is another matter entirely. The root cause of this outage was an undocumented, end-to-end, manual deployment process. The remedy was/is automation. The reality is that every manual deployment process is fraught with the potential for human error. I’ve seen it hundreds of times. It’s why the entire industry is moving toward automation. I’d also like to point out here that the history of outages that brought customers to the brink of cancellation happened well before I joined the company. Ironically, I later learned that the peer caused some of those outages. So why was I let go? The bottom line is that I was scapegoated. Whatever sin I committed, it did not, in and of itself, produce a service outage or sour customers. That happens when a service is upgraded and left in a failed state overnight. To the best of my knowledge, neither the peer nor IT person was ever held accountable. As the new guy, I was singled-out and punished. CONCLUSION These two incidents are the only ones I know of that could possibly be construed as harming ECi financially. That’s another reason I highlighted them. The others are, in my opinion, so absurd that if I were to list them you would likely laugh out loud. They’re that bad. Before bringing this review to a close, I’d like to say a little more about how my termination was handled. When I started at ECi, there was little to no onboarding. There was no clear communication of expectations or supportive guidance from my supervisor. I was literally left to my own devices to find areas where I thought I could make a positive difference. That sort of freedom is great for those who don’t want to be micromanaged (like me). It’s pernicious, however, when your supervisor tells you retroactively that you should have run everything by him before acting - as he’s letting you go. Sadly, what little contact there was between us, was largely initiated by me. I don’t think we would have had any one-on-ones if I hadn’t routinely set them up. The first time I had any hint that my boss was dissatisfied with my performance was during my last week on the job. The way he went about expressing it was entirely unprofessional. He communicated his displeasure by not looking at or specifically addressing me in a meeting where his comments were directed at me and the peer (see service outage). That was followed by a one-on-one (that I initiated as there was obviously something wrong) where he sat silently staring at me with open disgust and contempt. I’ve never had anyone treat me like that in a professional context before, probably because it’s completely unprofessional. At no point during this and subsequent meetings did he attempt to get my side of the story. No questions were asked about why I did what I did. When I asked him if we could review the issues he was upset about in detail, he didn’t have the time. So, I crafted a document like this one (only much longer and more detailed) to discuss each issue with the purpose of facilitating just such a discussion. After I sent him the document, he didn’t follow up. He just asked me to leave. I wish I could say that the good people at ECi make up for the company’s deep-seated problems and that future employees could work around these, but I can’t. Because of my disheartening experience, I cannot, in good conscience, recommend that anyone work for ECi, ever. If they did, they could very well end up like me: set back in their career and short five grand.
