Pros
1. Core technology was a pioneering work, but it has nothing to with the current executive team. 2. Good pay - until you take into account the hours you are expected to put in.
Cons
[1] Callous treatment of employees A typical day for Enphase India employees can start with meeting calls at 8 AM. After a full day's work, the meetings start again, and they can go on till 11 PM. After these late night calls, employees in India are often pulled into other individual calls, and made to work late into the night. A 12 hour work day is common at Enphase. The company does not officially support working from home - a fact conveyed to me early on by my manager. (Ironic, considering the current Corona situation.) India does not enforce its labour laws, which means that meetings are often held late at night India time. Employees are frequently put in a position such that they are forced to work weekends. In addition to working unreasonable hours, employees in India often have to put up with verbal abuse from the executive team in the US. An atmosphere of anxiety and exhaustion pervades the company. Strained jokes about burnout, insomnia, and divorce are common in the cafeteria. [2] Micromanagement This is a 500+ employee, publicly listed company in which the CEO routinely screams at engineers over a PPT of pending tasks. The executive team methodically cripples the working of the organisation by undermining managers and directly assigning tasks to engineers. Another type of meddling that Enphase practices is yanking projects from one team and dumping it on another, creating animosity within. The company also has a huge overhead of program managers. The ratio of the number of people asking others to do things versus the number of people actually doing useful things is shockingly high. Overall, the company has the feel of a primary school run by a cantankerous headmaster surrounded by sycophant teachers and terrified students. [3] Unrealistic deadlines and lack of domain knowledge Enphase sets it deadlines based on projected revenues and other fiscal considerations. Enphase is a hardware company, and there’s not much expertise in the current executive team on software development. Most seasoned software professionals would be aware of the basic tenet of the 1975 classic The Mythical Man-Month - "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". Development at Enphase is a comical violation of the above, and most basic principles and processes followed by software companies are ignored in this company. The result is a buggy, unmaintainable suite of products, and repeated failures to ship on time. The constant, immense pressure the executive puts on its employees is not helping. Conclusion: Enphase is not your family. You owe it to your family to take care of yourself, and not get stuck in a toxic workplace.
