Entropik Reviews

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.

Department is overrun by those who don’t contribute much. Only senior engineers and their junior colleagues are actively engaged, while management only assigns tickets and takes extended breaks. The product is immature and relies heavily on copied features. The co-founders lack a clear vision for the company and shamelessly imitate their competitors. Every feature is treated as an urgent requirement, with phrases like “X wants feature A” or “Y wants feature B” pushing for rushed, half-baked development. This mindset stems from a specific co-founder who is not only immature but also unprofessional, showing a clear lack of understanding of the engineering process. There is a clear lack of ethics in their approach to dismissals. When they intend to let someone go, they frequently try to save on weekend salaries. They schedule firings to avoid paying bonuses or increments, making the termination effective immediately. This behavior reflects a sadistic mindset and a complete lack of decency and professionalism. Furthermore, they insert terms and conditions in the increment letters aimed at saving even more money down the line. One of the co-founders often speaks in a way that feels uncivilized and illiterate, which is more than just unprofessional. He frequently interferes in engineering matters despite lacking any real knowledge of the field. It’s a shame to see a degree wasted like that. The organization is missing a strong engineering leader to steer development effectively. There's excessive micromanagement and a culture of both moral and ethical corruption, with even junior engineers demonstrating more ownership than the management. When an engineer tries to take initiative they are not supported instead micromanaged often blamed for delay despite delivering a better quality. Needless to say there is a lack of recognition of their efforts. Management is fixated on the development due date. At the start of each sprint, they ask engineers for rough estimates, but by the middle of the sprint, those estimates turn into a hard deadline that cannot be altered. If the deadline is missed, all hell will break loose. They struggle to identify where to allocate funds and where to cut costs. Despite facing a hefty AWS bill, they only saved a small amount by shutting down servers on weekends. No one is willing to pursue infrastructure improvements, as it demands skills, time, and effort. The work-from-home and leave policy is truly a joke. If you read other reviews, you'll see that HR and the co-founders have invested a lot of time and effort into crafting it, but their focus seems to be on saving every possible penny rather than supporting employees.