Pros
Compensation was very good! Which management used as a beating stick to get you to destroy your work-life balance ("hey, at least we get paid for it!" is a common phrase going into your 50th hour of overtime in a week). Also, I believe certain positions are compensated illegally under the FLSA (know your rights, if your employer is taking the professional exemption to deny you time and a half pay, you MUST be salaried, not hourly). Some of the people are really great! But guess what? A lot of people at a lot of companies are really great. ECI management and grunts alike love to flaunt this one about, but using this as a benefit is kind of tragic. Extremely limited work-from-home policies! If you either love sharing a cube farm or really want to fight tooth and nail for what is becoming increasingly recognized as the only rationale way to conduct business post-COVID, or if you are part of the vast minority that think that real work only gets done in a dated office building with a manager glued to your hip, then ECI's policies are sure to find a way to befuddle you anyways. Job security is nigh on infinite! During my time at ECI, nearly no one was fired. This is good news, yes? A manager who likes to belittle their employees, versus the greatest manager on planet Earth? An earnest worker who takes pride in their product versus a very lazy person who neither knows their job nor cares to learn? What if you like to get drunk as a skunk at the office Christmas party and harass your female coworkers? It would seem that all are welcome under the ECI banner, what the heck is a hostile work place?
Cons
Management. Just... all of it. There are, by my count, two low level managers and one mid level manager that were worth the carbon they are made out of. If incompetence were pigeons, ECI would be New York City. Managers at ECI fall into every single pitfall of management, every single time. They are the kind of people to believe that 9 women can make a baby in 1 month, they believe that schedules can just be accelerated indefinitely, that there's not a lot of difference between working a 40 and working a 50 constantly. They have a profound fondness for the empty promise, believing it to be the most effective strategy for a long term viable business model. A more spectacular meat grinder of human misery could not be made if each manager was hand selected for their ability to see other humans as chattel. Hours. ECI had a policy requiring 45 hours a week from all of its exempt employees. If you failed to meet this you were talked to. The baseline was 12.5% more than the maximum the union won for Americans before my grandfather was born. Over the course of a year, every 8 employees did an additional employee's worth of work on the low end. Buyer beware on being one of ECI's top performers though, or getting assigned to the wrong team. There are plenty of 50-55 hour averagers whose ghosts will presumably haunt the halls of the president's luxury mansion long into the future. Now, ECI will smooth your ruffled feathers and tell you the work is cyclical and has ups and downs. What this means is that for 363.75 days of the year you will be stressing over deadlines. On Christmas day and half of Christmas Eve, you will be stressing over deadlines and sipping hot cocoa. In a sense, this is a cycle, but it's not really what you were promised, because management do not care about you and would melt you down into a protein slurry if there were a profit motive. Budgets are bad, schedules are worse, and your personal life is at best an inconvenience. Viewed from certain angles, one would think that ECI is a human experiment to determine the quickest ways to drive someone into burnout and depression in order to rob them of the energy to so much as look for another job. Flexibility. Management is largely composed of very old white men who have had neither the time nor the desire to touch their own toes since they were babes swaddled in some sort of old timey Renaissance blanket, so it should not be a shock that their policies are as rigid and dated as their joints. Certain professional allowances are made, but you had better grab your rosary and bow before your god of choice if you aren't in your stinky little cube by 7:59 am every day of your miserable cog-in-the-machine existence. Oh, and the president doesn't like hats, so leave them in your car! When pressed on the issue of the bonus structure being distinctly nondiscretionary, management literally got rid of their bonus policy in the employee handbook to obfuscate the issue because somewhere in their shriveled, pre-movie Grinch hearts they understand that yelling, " DISCRETIONARY!" into the howling void of their souls doesn't make it so. Career Advancement. ECI will buy an entire company to prevent an existing employee from moving into settings. They'll hire someone without the proper licenses to be a project manager because the heavens would fall around them if some of their loyalists rose above their station. I'm not sure why they're so concerned over it, as the two title increases I received weren't accompanied by an increase in pay other than a courtesy inflation adjustment. Career advancement isn't completely absent, but the company is broken up into 4 camps: The Old Guard, people who've been around since at or near the inception and will never have to worry about money again; The Incompetents, people who can't go anywhere because they can't take a demotion elsewhere but they'd be summarily fired for their performance at any other company in the industry; The Greenhorns, newer employees who either don't understand that there are greener pastures or have not been sufficiently trained by ECI to leave; and The Comfortables, who have found an arrangement at ECI that they can live with, usually by stepping out of the path of career advancement and forcing their way into a position management is unhappy with but, by all observation, unable to do anything about. The Old Guard refuses to yield any power to these other groups, and as such ECI will perish with them, which will be a net increase to the overall ethics of the power engineering world.