Vantaggi
If your engineering skills are not strong, you can secure a position at Enercon with your attitude alone. The ESOP is beneficial, that is if you can last long enough to be fully vested to make it worth it (7 years).
Svantaggi
Culture Working at Enercon you will essentially be punished for having a strong work ethic and being technically competent. If you are capable of producing quality work autonomously you will be overloaded with work. Others who are not so technically inclined and/or need constant supervision will be given less work or no work and charge to overhead. At worst, underperformers will be verbally reprimanded for performing poorly, however they will not be laid off and no efforts will be made to improve the skills and abilities of those who perform poorly. Instead of placing technically competent employees in lead/management positions where they would be directing/training/growing others to perform at acceptable levels, they will remain as production engineers and be assigned and overloaded with work from all major projects. The poor performers will be given small simple assignments. Thus the reward for underperforming is a less demanding and less stressful work environment. This is not a place to grow your skills, either you join the company with the skill set you already have, or you stagnate and flounder. There are very few, one to three people, skilled enough to learn from but there will not be opportunities to work together to share knowledge. In-line with company policy of keeping everyone billable; employee improvements like mentoring, attending conferences, training modules, etc will not be paid for by the company. Enercon continuously writes proposals under-budget hours for fixed price bids, which gets them in trouble when all of the budgeted hours are used but the work has not been completed. The fact that no one tracks how many hours are used to complete a task to use that information on future bids keeps this cycle going. When an employee raises concern that the hours are used and the work is not complete they are ignored. This is not seen as a problem. The solution Enercon uses is to "pay it forward" by charging hours available for another project. IE: use hours for Project B to complete Project A. This leaves Project B with even less hours to complete, which further perpetuates: use some hours allocated to Project C to complete Project B and so on. The other fix for this is you will be expected to work unpaid overtime or even unpaid at all, this is especially true for assignments that are over budget (no more hours available to charge so you are on your own time), and ones that are behind schedule (no approved overtime to complete it on schedule so you will have to work the extra hours to complete it on schedule on your own time). This will happen frequently because the people writing proposals have no idea the time it takes to complete projects and cannot accurately estimate man hours and clients are willing to accept low-ball bids in their favor. When experienced employees create detailed estimates for bids including manhours, their superiors without the proper knowledge tell them to trim the hours. When you ask these lead individuals how or where the hours can be trimmed they cannot find a task where they see the hours high they just repeat that the overall cost is too high and the hours are to be trimmed. Enercon is a financial company that does engineering on the side. The company culture in the Overland Park office is not any different than the main office in GA. The company methods and culture are the same throughout all offices. Look at the other reviews here and decide for yourself if you want to work there. The maximum duration anyone excluding upper management has worked in the Overland Park office is 3 years. Employees get fed up stressed out and leave. Management Management tries to hold your job over your head. The problem is the only tool in their management tool box is a hammer. They know no other means to motivate, all they really know is how to threaten. The obvious issue with this management style is no employee can be motivated by fear of threats. Fear does not inspire loyalty or commitment to a company or manager. No amount of monetary compensation will make someone not eventually dread coming into work every day if they know their job will be threatened or they will be chastised. An employee will only tolerate it for some time before starting to look for work elsewhere. Taking a position with a lower salary at a company that respects them will be a better deal if it alleviates the threats and fear. Fear inspires short term conformation and long term resignation. Employees with real skills and abilities will be able to find work elsewhere because they can, they do not have to stay in a work environment they do not like. They can negotiate comparable salaries, benefits, etc because of their abilities. New graduate hires and inexperienced/incapable employees will stay because they have no other option. The OP Enercon office is well on its way to being solely staffed with lowest quality, least useful, least capable employees; those who will tolerate the threats, finger pointing, and disrespect because they do not have a choice. They do not have a choice because they have no real talent or abilities to get themselves comparable positions somewhere else. They stay because the alternative is nothing. Management has no understanding of or doesn't care about manhours and schedule. If, for example, a task has been estimated to take 160 hours to complete for one person (4 weeks of work for one person) but the schedule was developed so that it is due in 2 weeks the poor sap who it has been assigned to will be expected to complete it in 2 weeks and without overtime pay. When generating proposals adding 5-10% additional hours for management is a standard accepted practice. It is also understood and acceptable practice by clients that work requires management supervision. But at Enercon no management hours are included because, as you are told, they want to "keep everyone billable". That is understandable, but it doesn't work in practice and the company doesn't even try to hold true to its word by keeping everyone billable. There are leads that don’t produce deliverables and only manage project hours and provide minimal and sometimes trivial and incorrect technical guidance. They charge hours to projects but do not provide deliverables and are the exact reason that management hours need to be included in proposals. Clients are more than happy to accept a lower estimate and balk at the request for more hours later. If you quote more hours and spend less than you quoted you look like a hero to your client, if you quote less hours, use all of them, then request more to complete the work, your client loses confidence in your ability to do the work and also accurately estimate work. You also you screw up your client’s budget and make yourself and your company look incompetent. This is how Enercon operates; they use their low bid estimate to get their foot in the door but don’t follow through by delivering a quality product on budget and schedule per their own estimate. As mentioned above, you will be expected to work for free because of someone else's poor ability to write estimates. Due to Enercons continual use of under-budgeting while producing sub-par products, their primary client that has been providing the majority (about 80%) of their work for the last 3 years has not renewed their EOR contract. In line with the philosophy of "keeping everyone billable" management does not have project controls personnel, they believe project controls is useless and unnecessary. It is obvious that management has never had experience on larger scale or complex projects where it would be evident that a scheduler/project controls person would be needed. Even on smaller scale and simpler projects a project controls person would be helpful being able to track hours billed vs percent complete of project tasks, write trends, keep a database for Enercons actual hours spend performing tasks which would allow for accurate estimates. Yet there are extraneous project managers and leads whose only tasks or the majority of their time is spent managing hours. One project controls employee, used correctly, can replace 1 project manager and at least 3 leads. I have never sought technical guidance from Sr. management so I cannot make a judgment about their technical abilities but they certainly have 0 management abilities. It makes me wonder if, when Enercon started the Overland Park office, they were the very last persons on a very long list the Georgia office asked to head the Overland Park office. Management believes that since they pay you, they can treat you however they like, and that is acceptable because you profit from it. Management effectively treats you like a prostitute. Advancement Most companies are not 100% meritocracy based, they are usually a combination of skill based (meritocracy) and how well liked the employee (cronyism). However Enercon does not follow any meritocratic rules. Promotions are not based on competence, experience or performance, but only by how well liked you are by management. Management will even violate Enercon’s own policies for persons that are well liked. The Sr. management believes “when you are ready to be a lead a light bulb will turn on above your head". This was announced during an all-hands office meeting. Being a leader doesn’t mean "being ready" to be a leader or whatever metaphor the light bulb symbolizes. Leaders should be employees who grow into supervisor positions through their skills: have they proven themselves technically capable of understanding the work well enough to do it themselves and be able to explain it to and guide others, can they accurately estimate their own work load, and estimate it well enough for writing proposals for others work load, have they shown themselves capable of working as team to complete tasks, have they shown themselves able to guide/motivate others to complete tasks, are they capable of working autonomously, prioritize problems, come up with solutions, etc, etc. These are all measurable tasks that Sr. management disregards when choosing leaders. Additionally promotions to lead positions come with [supposed] additional responsibilities but do not come with additional compensation. It doesn’t matter that by Enercon’s own policy you need your PE to be a lead. There are engineers who are college hires and/or have but a few months of design experience get promoted to lead engineers. Leads are supposed to provide technical guidance to junior engineers, write proposals, and interface with clients. Putting employees with just a few months of design experience in charge of providing technical guidance is a disaster, they have the same, if not less design experience as the other engineers they are to be guiding. Their lack of design experience also results in inaccurate proposal hours and scope estimating and they make themselves and the company look foolish to clients. Work The projected employee need has been increasing month after month though the office has not been awarded new contracts for almost a full fiscal year. Work is running out and the majority of employees have been on overhead for almost a year. Yet there is still hiring of new employees. The Sr. management does not understand why companies have resources devoted to employee retention and instead take pride in running off employees. Sr. management doesn't realize that the return on investment of keeping an existing employee is 50-100% higher than that of hiring a new employee. As yet another way the office is penny wise pound foolish. They are stingy with office supplies. If you need supplies, you will have to buy your items yourself because unless you managed to get something when the monthly order comes in, you are not getting it until the next month and only if it’s on the approved list. The same quantity of supplies is ordered even though the number of employees has increased. The Sr. management has decided that not providing the tools employees need in order to save money on supplies is the better choice. As an employee you are literally worth less than a $10 pack of pens in the eyes of Enercon. Again, Sr. management doesn’t understand that productive employees are productive because they have the tools they need. If an employee costs the company $50 an hour, but has a reduced efficiency by even 5%, that is $20 a day you could be saving by providing that employee the tools he needs to be more efficient. If that includes a highlighter, get them a highlighter. Things like this are so basic to the business management world that the cluelessness of Enercon management is baffling. While employee inefficiency due to lack of tools, management, or employee turnover may have less importance for cost reimbursement contracts because your inefficiencies get passed on directly to your clients, it is imperative for a company that bids contracts without any consideration of overhead costs to be as efficient as possible. Overall Impression Managers, supervisors, and leads should be providing resources and removing obstacles. At Enercon they provide minimal, low quality resources both in the form of physical resources (supplies) and technical resources (no experience to provide correct guidance) and will either act as obstacles to the project or leave obstacles for the engineers who produce deliverables to struggle with. You will not advance here unless you are part of the chosen few that Sr. management likes, again this is independent of your abilities. You will not grow here and the very week you are hired you will be scraping together hours just to get to your 40 per week. I will not be returning to Enercon and I would advise you to look elsewhere.
