During the interview process there were a lot of lies or at best half-truths. This was a job for technical support. Management continued to talk nonsense on a daily basis telling us that maybe in the future we can move into other departments, but other people told us there were no openings in any part of the company. Eventually they will probably move you, but you don’t a say or much notice, and your title still may not even match the work you do.
The job title you start with, graduate technical trainee (GTT), is absolutely meaningless, and it’s on purpose. It’s so that they can trick you into doing work that’s different from what you were expecting when you applied. My recruiter told me I would only have the title for 6 weeks, but there’s people who have the title months later. And some benefits will be denied to you on the basis that they’re not for GTTs. For example, relocation assistance will be denied even though it’s listed in the benefits booklet I received both with my offer letter and in print on the first day of the job, and a surprisingly large amount of people in this company join as a GTT. Probably not legal.
Everything is disorganized. Documentation is fragmented, incomplete, and usually outdated. People who I thought were my manager would ask me who my manager is, and I never really found out.
A lot of times I just didn't access to the stuff I need to do my work and it makes everything involve more people and take 20 times as long. For example, we’re not allowed to report a bug to the engineering team unless we submit logs but also they’re the only ones who have access to logs. Sometimes engineers ask me to find the source of bugs without any access to any of the source code, logs, or anything on AWS. So I have to coordinate with an engineer anyways just so I can get logs from a certain point in time and they would send me a 1GB zip file in which I struggle to find anything of value at all. Wasting everyone's time for no reason.
Our product has no environment deployed for testing or training. Only production. Meaning if I had to test something to look into a bug, I would have to ask one of our customers if I can do testing on their production environment or collect logs. This may involve creating a bunch of fake users or articles and just disrupting production in general. That is literally is what I was told to do. Great experience for our multi-billion dollar partners. This is absolutely silly for so many reasons but is just one of the many ways eGain shows its incompetence. I might have to coordinate with the India team to do testing outside of business hours, and a lot of times the India team doesn’t understand the task even if it’s extremely simple.
The programming languages I was told I would work with are languages that nobody at the company uses, and I never got permission to any source code at all. They pretended to be surprised when I said the job isn’t what I thought it was. They hire a new batch of GTTs every few months, and previous GTTs I spoke to said they went through the same experience, so it’s always been like this and it will never change. Eventually they will hire even more GTTs to replace those who quit, but they will continue with the half-truths and the cycle will continue.
There’s a lot of time spent on training us on how to use the company’s software, both through Teams meetings and online training courses, but newhires wouldn’t need nearly as much training if the product were at all intuitive.
It seems that eGain was more successful in the earlier 2000s but has since refused to update its product in a meaningful way, which is why it looks like File Explorer from Windows 2000 and is no longer unique.
eGain loves to drop buzzwords in their marketing. We’re a cloud platform and compete with AWS! (They use AWS and no servers are made public.) We’re diverse! (Absolutely not, but it’s easy to lie about so of course you do.)
