Work hard and get rewarded - Lead Digital Design Engineer Escape Communications Employee Review

Minor: - Free snacks in the kitchen. - Work location is pretty nice, as it's close to Palos Verdes and lots of lunch locations. - 3% Non-elective contribution to 401k once a year. Major: - The work is very hands-on and usually pretty interesting & engaging. Lots of opportunities to do lab testing even as a Software Engineer. - Fairly diverse technical projects. During my time at this company, I worked on about a dozen different projects (compared to just 3 at my last position at a large Defense company where I stayed for a longer time). Most projects on the software side revolved around a command line interface (CLI) menu to read/write FPGA registers, but there were also some projects that required low-level SPI device drivers to high-level GUIs built in JavaScript/React. - Overall pretty good work-life balance; I only ever had to work overtime once or twice for a project deadline, and that was only for an extra hour or so. - Flexible work schedule (core hours are 9am-3pm, but there was some flexibility around that, and I was able to come in around 10am on most days unless there was an earlier meeting). - Engineering colleagues are very talented, smart, and pleasant to work with. - Since they are a small company, there is very little bureaucracy despite mostly working on Defense contracts.

Minor: - 401k benefits are not great; there is no company match, and although you get 3% no matter what to your 401k, it doesn't appear until late into the following year. For example, if you started work in 2021, you wouldn’t see the 3% company contribution for that year until ~October 2022. - Some projects rely on outdated tech (PowerPC’s, old Linux distros, etc.). - Since most contracts are Defense-related, the company is pretty strict with time-keeping. I had to fix my timesheet several times because the wrong charge number(s) were used. Major: - Lack of WFH opportunities: - I had interviewed for this position at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and when I had asked if I could WFH for this position sometimes, management had claimed that I could expect to WFH ~50% of the time. Once I started, this turned out to be false, as the general expectation (even during Covid) was to come into the office everyday, and that you could only WFH if you provided an excuse (such as a scheduled doctor’s appointment or your car was in the shop). - As a Software Engineer, I only needed to be in the lab in-person maybe 1-2x a week on average; I was still expected to show up in-person throughout Covid despite this. - After asking management several times to be able to WFH a few times a week, I was finally granted the ability to do so… after having worked here for about a year, and after Covid vaccines had been distributed. - This ties in with the above point, but the work location is a double-edged sword: while it’s in a nice area, it’s not very accessible for employees who live outside of a ~10 mile radius. The office is not at all close to any freeways, so I frequently had to drive 15-20 mins on side streets after the freeway to get to the office. - Company culture can oftentimes feel a bit like a boys’ club where certain employees feel that they can say things that would normally be inappropriate in an office setting with no repercussions