Pros
Timely crediting of salary, fancy MacBooks, and a fairly central location that makes it easy to commute to-and-fro. Plus, the Tech itself is pretty novel which makes for good conversations when I meet other SaaS professionals.
Cons
General Stinginess: The company is pretty stingy with attracting or retaining talent. A bunch of us had our designations changed to the next level with no change in pay. The company’s assertion? “Designation bump and pay bumps have no relation to one another”. In addition, they have been unable to scale up their Product and Engineering team all because they refuse to pay the market rate for talent today. Lastly, they have let a lot of good people go in the last 1.5 years, all because they thought they could lose that institutional knowledge and get someone else in on the cheap. They had some big exits in their Data Science team, and decided to replace those folks with half a dozen interns. LOL. Lacking Good Strategy: A large chunk of the current employee base was hired when Entropik was trying to get their Emotion AI technology called Affect Lab off the ground. Since then, the company took some steps to build the product by introducing things like a Shopper Insights module, a mobile app, and then abandoned all those initiatives half way. Now they’ve been building out a tech for qualitative research and putting all bets on it. All this indicates a lack of direction & strategy on part of the Leadership. Who knows what pet project they’ll start working on next? Obsession with Work-From-Office: The company leadership and the HR team have this unhealthy obsession with WFO. Half the HR team probably exists to just walk around the floor, and report folks who are working remotely to the company leadership. Talk to the folks in Engg. and they’ll tell you one reason Entropik is unable to attract talent (besides the stinginess with compensation) is the fact that the company insists on working from the office. They don’t even indulge discussions of a hybrid approach. Clueless and Flip-Flopping HR: Speaking of HR, I feel their sole purpose in the company is to - walk around and check who’s in the office, giggle around with middle managers, and plan silly employee engagement activities. There’s absolutely no emphasis on doing employee pulse check ins, mapping out Professional Development and other activities that mature HR functions do. Ask them some hard questions about the company policy or processes and you might as well be talking to a deer in the headlights. Poor Facilities: While the BLR office location is convenient, the building itself is pretty poor. There is a constant fight for parking slots, there are no good places nearby for snacks, lunch or coffee, and there’s limited seating space around lunch times in the breakout area. For an office hosting 100+ employees, meeting rooms are limited and mostly occupied by the HR team, and VPs who wanted a cabin to stoke their egos. Plus, the air conditioning sucks.