• 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.
