EKN Engineering Reviews

The managers and executives tout values of integrity, community, and idea-sharing, but, what they actually mean, is very different. Resources were allocated to the company's culture so much so that basic hiring needs were swept under the rug and the projects suffered substantially. Ideas and suggestions were only tolerated if they aligned exactly with what they wanted to hear - suggestions to optimize processes were often seen as threats to management. I regularly had to abandon my work to participate in "EKN Olympics." Overall, the company's attempt to foster a fun culture was so contrived and cringe-worthy. We never needed crazy team games to make friends, people do that naturally. All we wanted was decent pay, health insurance, and an environment that TRULY fostered and encouraged collaboration and common sense processes. When I left, everyone else in our department was actively looking for other work.

First things first: the pay is awful. I was brought on at just a dollar or two above minimum wage just weeks before the fast food minimum wage was raised to well exceed my pay. Add on to this the fact that the company’s executive and HR teams are some of the most out of touch individuals on the planet and you have a recipe for disaster. Members of the HR team openly and unironically complaining about how hard it was to hire young people despite offering them poverty wages, executives rolling up to work in luxury cars and walking past their employees struggling to survive on the pennies the company so “graciously” offers them, and an absolutely venomous workplace culture full to the brim with “mean girls” and creepy men. I could go on forever and still miss some key points. It’s an engineering firm operated like a tech startup and the company is not afraid to chew people up and spit them out when their usefulness has been forcefully wrung out of them like so many startups have before. Did I forget to mention their “compliance” department with not a single lawyer on the team leading to an absolute minefield of liability that I’m not confident a single executive has ever thought about?