This place will suck the life out of you. - Lead Product Designer Stellar Elements Employee Review

You know something is wrong when your consulting company’s employees feel safer and happier with client partners than your own company’s leaders. Staff Aug is all this place does anymore, and on your 10th stretch of staff aug, you’ll really start to wonder: why am I working at SE and not just get a FT job with the client? You’ll see more and more people leave to go work for clients. I don’t like to throw around the word gaslight, but the leaders here are terrible at gaslighting but do so anyways. In Q2 of 23 they announced a pay freeze and promo freeze. It has not gone away but what they did tell us was that “no, there was never a promo freeze.” Seriously. They spent an all hands meeting with slides explaining what their definition of a promotion is, and that there was never a freeze! They only did this because so many people kept mentioning the promo freeze in exit interviews. To top it all off, tons of people who were already up for promotions in Q2 never got one in 2023 at all. Is that not a freeze? What does it mean when 80% of your employees think there’s a freeze but you come out and say “lol no there isn’t.” Your benefits will continuously be stripped away until you have nothing left. They will work you to the bone, because bench time used to mean that you could spend time on professional dev or working on internal initiatives to better the company. Bench time now means that you are fired, even if you were just on put on the bench. Oh, guess what, they also took away the professional dev budget completely. What benefits are left? Literally nothing. No PD, once free healthcare is now paid, $100 for phone use and internet is now $75, 401k is super poor (you only get the full measly 3% match if you stay 5 years), no technology refreshes, and they will force you into the office even if all your clients are remote anyways. You will go into the office to sit on zoom alone. And there won’t even be enough meeting rooms. Within a year of working in this place, you’ll notice just how much this place sucks when all the people who were kind and cared about you during your onboarding are now gone. Within a year you’ll look around and see that you don’t recognize anyone anymore. It’s all new people. And those new people will go through the same exact experience as you: slowly losing your sanity and watching friends leave or get laid off or get replaced by offshore labor. The way that SE (formerly projekt202) functions is that it is owned but a massive international company called Amdocs. SE slowly lurches around and buys up smaller companies. These smaller companies all had great vibrant cultures and happy people at some point: ADK, Roam Digital, Big Nerd Ranch. It then takes the vibrant culture out back and puts it down ruthlessly. And then it moves onto the next company to do that. If you are reading this because SE is buying your company, good luck. This place is a graveyard of your professional hopes and dreams.