Pros
• The company matches your 401K contributions dollar for dollar, up to 5 percent of your salary. • Telecommuting is an option for many technology professionals. • The baseline products are solid cash cows that will continue generating revenue for the company for the foreseeable future. • Many S&P/Fortune 500 clients. • Sustainable growth, about half of which is organic. • The worker bee class consists of many brilliant, talented people. • You can form tight bonds on the project teams you work on. There are many highly performing teams, and people get along with one another across different disciplines. • About 1 in 5 employees will quickly advance their careers with promotions and increased responsibility. Commentary: As stated in the review title, Epsilon first and foremost is a marketing company that does technology, and not the other way around. This is important to keep in mind. The people making technology decisions are not technologically-oriented people. They are marketers. As such, they know how to sell a product. They do not understand technology on a deep level. Structurally, the basic model is the client project team. Every developer is assigned to a project team which often consists of a BSA, a PM, a tech lead, a business lead, and an account manager. The account manager engages the client and negotiates the work for the team. The PM and the tech lead provide estimates to the account lead, and break the work up into manageable tasks for the developers. As a developer, you will spend most of your time interacting with members on your client project team, and little time with anyone else. In some cases, a developer may interact with his or her manager once a week or even once every two weeks. Your performance feedback comes from members on your project team. Culturally, the company is divided into those who do the work and those who do not. The latter is a fairly large class consisting of about a third of all employees. Ostensibly, these people manage the people doing the work. In reality, these are people who have been promoted through the ranks, in large part due to the company's vitality curve ("rank and yank") system. After many years of this system, the most outstanding workers have been promoted, and gradually everyone else has been fired or has left the company. The class of employees who actually do work is youth-oriented. The company recruits interns from local colleges and offers them jobs with the company. As an entry-level employee, you often will be expected to work long hours (50-60 hours per week) to meet the tight deadlines negotiated by the account manager. If you work hard and are talented, you will likely be promoted frequently over the course of a few years -- this will happen to 1 in 5 employees. Within 5 years at the company, you will be a manager. At this point, your work/life balance improves dramatically.
Cons
• Compensation -- at least for IT professionals -- is approximately 15-20 percent below the current market rate. (Note: this is offset somewhat by the company's extremely generous 401K match program and the availability of telecommuting -- you have to factor both of these in to see if Epsilon will work for you) • Too many managers who do little or nothing. More than a third of employees hold a title of director or VP. This creates significant overhead for the company, and creates a highly politicized environment as these managers attempt to justify their purpose. • Older technologies. It's the Microsoft stack and Oracle, and both are about 3-4 years behind current versions. • Corporate politics. Politics are an inevitable part of any organization. Epsilon is worse than most. Decisions are often driven by individuals trying to exert their power, and are often not data-driven. • An officious HR department. The primary responsibilities of HR appear to provide a lengthy regimen of mandatory compliance and training courses, which the HR department rigorously enforces. Many of these required courses were inspired by a famous data breach that affected the company in 2011, and by lawsuits from former employees. HR also oversees the company's rank-and-yank system, which ranks every employee in the company from first to last. This task is inevitably unfair, as it compares employees with the same titles working in different locations under different managers and under different project teams involving different clients. It is literally comparing apples to oranges and justifying it by saying that both are ripe fruits. • Bureaucracy. More than a third of all employees are directors or VPs or above. This creates a very structured environment, and sometimes makes it difficult to get things done in a timely fashion. • Great potential for age discrimination. A review process that may discriminate against older employees. This is because its rank-and-yank process hurts older employees and favors younger ones. Commentary: Epsilon is a youth-oriented company. It thrives on a constant stream of new bright, young workers. Many of the workers these workers are replacing are older ones, and sometimes not through attrition or advancement. On occasion, these older workers are forced out by the company, and sometimes the process is not entirely fair or clear to the targeted employee. There are little company resources for older workers who feel they are victims of age discrimination. If you go to the company's internal ethics website, it discusses assistance against all types of illegal discrimination -- gender, race, ethnicity, religion. Curiously missing is anything about age discrimination. It's almost as if senior management forgot that it is against the law to discriminate on the basis of age, or it just decided not to help victims of age-based discrimination. As mentioned earlier, the company ranks every one of its employees, from first to last. The people doing the ranking are not your manager or even your project team members. It is senior management and HR. Those employees rated among the top 20 percent receive raises and are promoted; the next 70 percent receive cost-of-living adjustments; the bottom 10 percent are fired or encouraged to leave the company. The ranking system is extremely political, as most employees work on project teams and the people doing the ranking have never met or interacted with the employees they rank. You will know where you fall in the ranking system after your first review, based on your salary increase and whether or not you are promoted. Of the 70 percent you are rated as "Performer," one of two things will happen to you. You will eventually move up the curve until you are promoted after many years (5-8 years), or you will eventually move down the curve until you are placed in the bottom 10 percent. This is because the company is constantly cutting off the tail of the vitality curve. As the company eliminates under-performing employees, more and more employees who are actually performing get moved to the under-performing category and targeted for termination. This is what happened to me. For years, I was part of that middle 70 percent for years, and I saw people below me getting fired every year. Eventually, I got placed in that category even though I received outstanding feedback from my manager, my account manager, and my entire project team and we met every single one of our goals. We even generated almost a million dollars in unplanned revenue for the company. The client was happy with me, my account manager was happy with me, my team was happy with me. It didn't matter -- it was my turn to take the hit, per the process Irrespective of the case, if you are among the 70 percent of employees who are rated as a "performer," you can expect to be paid 15-20 percent below the market for many years. Those who are ranked "Outstanding" will get promoted into management, creating a permanent class of youthful workers.
