Pros
- Management cares about employees and making it a good place to work. - Management cares about designing good products. - A good work/life balance. Employees are encouraged to use their time off, which is a generous amount, particularly generous for entry-level employees. - Work arrangements can be flexible in many cases (in terms of both hours and working from home). - Opportunity to work on a wide variety of projects, from medical to aerospace to consumer electronics. - It's a small and growing company, which offers a lot of opportunity for career advancement and making contributions to help build and grow the company's infrastructure.
Kontras
- Management puts a high priority on flexibility due to widely varying clients and products, which means many things (processes, roles, deliverables, milestones) are not well defined or standardized, which means things are often not well-organized. - A significant proportion of the team are relatively new to product design (<5 years experience in the industry, or have been through 0 or 1 full product design cycles), which contributes to disorganization and fuzzy or unrealistic expectations of what's needed to get a product to market. - Speed of hitting near-term milestones is often prioritized at the expense of accumulating technical debt and longer-term risks. (Some of this is client-driven, some of it is Engenious' culture.) - Many of the products that Engenious works on never make it to market. There are many reasons for this, and many of them are out of Engenious' control (client-side problems), but it's something to be aware of if you want to build a portfolio of products that actually make it to market. NOTE: Despite the cons above, Engenious does take medical device design and safety seriously and is committed to following regulations and designing safe products. It's the non-medical products that often suffer more from the problems above.