Fake tech company, but could be great with some changes - Software Engineer Ellucian Employee Review

- Hiring Process: Teams must deal with ‘use it or lose it budgeting’ which results in a mentality of hire-and-fire to gamify budgets, rather than trimming out candidates early in the hiring process to get the right skillset fit. No standardization across teams for types of questions, levels of questions. Company has a difficult time understanding that “you get what you pay for” when hiring and recruiters tend to indiscriminately filter out candidates that would be good for other roles but at a higher rate. Company in the past had hired on people in sprees, then had to manage out low performers picked up in the spree, but has kept some low performers on board to preserve budget. Careers site has been broken, and managers wonder why they don’t get resumes. Company has dropped the ball on referrals, and recruiters don’t promote transparency to candidates on what’s holding up the hiring decision. - Budgeting process and hiring fallout: Unnecessarily dragged out and complex. The lapse in budget approval results in being unable to hire people, thus leaving them able to be scooped up by competitors. There is a lack of incentive for responsible staff planning; in response to this uncertainty, managers tend to spend budget zealously once it is ‘released’, and tend to over-allocate requisitions, then remove or transform requisitions after the opening, which to outsiders gives the impression of phantom roles. Hiring freezes occur later in the year to conserve budget, and requisitions are left open for new applicants. Both of these processes can result in a negative candidate experience as people apply, interview, and are “ghosted” due roles being frozen or reallocated. - Budgeting for cloud infrastructure: Teams need to make estimates for cloud infrastructure budgets for up to 15 months ahead of time, without knowledge of product requirements, estimated customer adoption rates, or necessary architecture changes that would affect infrastructure considerations. Estimates are treated as a promise instead of estimates, leading to unnecessary drama when budgets are exceeded due to unforeseen requirements. This leads to a race-to-the-bottom model where teams iterate on architecture with internal cost in mind rather than customer experience or market suitability. Management tends to ask questions around product cost for individual products while not thinking about the opportunities to reduce overall cost across a set of products. - Training: Budgeting for training or conferences is an arcane process, requiring travel and training estimates to be given up to 15 months ahead of an event. Training budget is also “use it or lose it” so there is a preference to training at the beginning of the year rather than a priority preference, which leads to gamification and unnecessary politics. Industry is moving towards shorter tenures and more junior team members sometimes leave before having the opportunity to do any sort of certification or training. Company would be better off assigning some prepaid funds per-person for training rather than the multi-year binary strategy it currently uses. - Private Equity: Owned by PE means frequent cost cutting. Company seems to want to go to the model of hiring a few key people for architecture that guide a large team of low-cost team members with an assumption that these people can act as an autonomous “software factory”. In the past 6 months, there has been enormous pressure to reduce cost through hiring in India, and management seems to be on a death march to implement this, even though they may not personally agree with that directive. It seems like an eventuality that the only persons in US engineering will be management/figureheads. Already, the company has made the decision to shy away from hiring engineers in the coastal tech hubs; markedly admitting it will not compete with tech companies, while externally marketing itself as on the same caliber. There is a “ramp up and maintenance mentality” where the company tends to hire on new people to build greenfield products, then lay them off when the product is destined for maintenance, which leads to bad feelings if these expectations aren’t stated at the beginning. Company’s project-based mentality is more suited for contracting in some cases, except the company’s budget practices don’t align to hire such personnel. This is heavily seen in stagnation of the company’s ERP products. - Bonus structure: Company relies heavily on base salary for individual contributors, which leads to candidates requesting an overall higher total compensation than for competitors to make up the difference. As a result, there is little incentive for high performance or innovation. Sign-on bonuses are not given due to a budgeting constraint. This can severely impact the marketability of the position for candidates that need that flexibility to make up for lost stock compensation. Company values certainty in cost over anything, which in its extreme form can actually cost the company money. - Leveling: On the junior end, company is not competing with competitors’ offers, which is leading to lopsided attrition in the area which needs growth the most. Almost the entire cohort of new grad hires has left, and the company knows it cannot compete. This has resulted in sporadic intake of R&D interns and no consistent associate pipeline in the US. In some cases, more junior members expressed an interest in staying with the company due to the culture, but felt they had to leave to get a more competitive offer, and matching offers can’t be extended due to budget restrictions. Even more senior people are starting to experience the same issue; new guidelines for levels have effectively prolonged tenure within pay bands. People do want to come back, but administrative burdens only make it a reality after the next budgeting cycle. Company’s job postings that list years of experience do not match with internal guidelines and should be effectively ignored. - Highly territorial: Company tends to reflect its customers in higher education in terms of internal processes: they are a professional services company masquerading as a tech company, and it shows. Some internal processes serve to exert control or create the illusion of control rather than streamline delivery. Company as a whole will go to the cloud kicking and screaming. - Consultant mentality: Being in an IC role is more equivalent to being a consultant than a normal technology role. Being able to come up with an answer quickly along with an exact time estimate is valued more highly than being able to automate a process, use a new tool, or remove a bottleneck that will provide real customer value. Lots of time is spent getting small things in writing solely to cover oneself in case of failure of another party, which can lead to an individualist and tense environment more commonly seen in consulting. - “Quality Readouts” - There are efforts to create a global dashboard of software product quality, and the desire for metrics has caused a lot of stress to people implementing products, who are now more concerned with “looking good” to the metrics which require no defects but changing many things. The same quality metrics are used on legacy products as greenfield products. This has led to negative morale and a reduction in innovation as people want to take the safe route. - Operations model: Company needs to look into equipping operations teams with the tools and skills to be a cloud-first organization. Team complexion and skillsets are aligned into a lift-and-shift model, and this won’t be sustainable. Cloud operations team in its current form adds little value due to skill misalignment, and could be heavily automated.