Pros
Enova can certainly name a lot of benefits and perks; however, what they don't tell you are the terms and conditions associated with the most desirable perks. For example, tuition reimbursement of up to 10k per year is real; however, you need to have been at Enova for a year and need to stay at Enova a year after the end of your reimbursed classes to take complete advantage of the program. Despite the somewhat misleading advertising though, Enova has some redeeming qualities: - Enova sponsors H-1B visas. International student new grads should definitely apply! It's a good place to learn out of college. The learning curve is there, but flattens to comatose levels past year 1. - Enova still has some young people / new grads working there. They generally love to hang out and explore the city and surrounding areas together. The young people also stick together and look out for each other. Though more and more of the young talent are leaving, there is a strong "alumni network" of former Enova employees. - Enova has opportunities to learn and grow, if you ask for them and if you're on the right team. Teams that are more client-facing (clients here can be other business teams or actual customers) tend to have less flexibility for "enovation," whereas other teams that have basically zero accountability unless if things truly go wrong are arguably some of the most innovative teams. Outside of thinking in terms of teams, if you're on a new venture, you will be forced to take on a lot of responsibilities and can grow really quickly. It's a great opportunity to learn if you're willing to put in the work. Exit opportunities for people involved in the China project seem to be pretty good, if the latest turnover results are any indication.
Cons
- Enova sponsors H-1B visas, which is great for international students who are looking for jobs out of college or grad school. But keep in mind they are pretty trigger-happy about firing people on work visas. One from analytics and another from China team were fired while on visa. Green card sponsorship requires that you wait ONE YEAR before they start the process. If you need visa sponsorship, chances are you are Chinese or Indian, which means getting the actual green card will take at least 5-10 years. If you're a new grad you really shouldn't consider staying this long unless if you really have no better options than growing old with Enova. - Enova is changing to an older and more stable culture. Older because we only hire new grads (at any level) as analysts. In the past year, senior associate and manager roles have been given to external hires with 10+ years of industry experience. I'm not sure fresh new grads stand a chance of being promoted from analyst to senior associate within 2 years anymore (this has happened multiple times prior to 2013). It's pretty clear that the "from intern to VP" career trajectory that is still being advertised in Enova recruiting propaganda will never happen again. - Enova has opportunities to learn and grow -- or else. Due to high turnover, a lot of people are basically set up to fail with impossible "opportunities". Exhibit A: analytics has a big software architecture overhaul that has been touched by teams of engineers and our ex-data architect. In the past few months, everyone who has worked on this project left except one junior person. Said person now is in charge of making the entire project run (to be fair the senior data scientist we hired for this role bailed). Exhibit B: one of the few remaining old people in business analytics left recently, and his thousands-of-lines-long code that touches all areas of the data model was callously handed off to a new hire, and new hire was given 2 weeks to absorb old guy's two years' worth of business and product knowledge that is required to maintain and extend the code. Sometimes, the line between opportunities and death traps are blurry. In these cases, they seem indistinguishable. - That Enova has good work/life balance, and hence lower compensation is to be expected is a myth. Enova has good work/life balance if you're on the right team (like HR). Having managers email/text/call you at 10pm asking for a report or analysis done first thing in the morning is not unheard of. Also some managers will load your priority queue with tasks that are all "top-priority" and "ASAP". At Enova, there is a saying that you should "push-back" if you feel like you don't have work-life balance. That's interesting because our promotion and performance reviews are decided by the very people that we are supposed to be telling to back off with the ridiculous expectations. The work/life balance aspect is very team and manager dependent, but do not make the mistake of thinking that Enova is a place with great work/life balance as a rule. - And about the compensation... look, there is absolutely no reason why the company cannot give every single employee a pay raise besides the reason that upper management ultimately views lower employees as interchangeable machine parts. And in their eyes, this is justified for the most part. Let's not kid ourselves, 90% of the work that actually makes Enova money were built between 2004 and 2010. 99% of the people Enova hires now are just there as insurance, so that if something does break, they can blame someone and doesn't have to spend months finding someone new to fix it. And as insurance, it doesn't matter one bit to upper management who fills a role, as long as it is filled. However, interesting things start to happen when interchangeable machine parts don't behave as parts anymore, but start failing collectively, such as this year, when software engineers started leaving left right and center, from CTO to senior leadership to the devs in the trenches. In the case of a systematic failure, management is forced to concede that though one employee is as replaceable as a loose screw, a group of employees is harder to replace. And guess what happened next? Oh, right. Two rounds of across-the-board raises for software engineers of all levels in the past few months to keep them happy and retained. The lesson here is clear: 1). reactive management all the way around; never do actual nice things for employees if things are not breaking; 2). even Enova agrees you can be better compensated by Enova, but only if Enova can agree to give some care around you. - But what about benefits like discounted haircuts, dry cleaning or corporate events, you ask? Well, being underpaid by at least 5k can surely be compensated by the fact that I can get 5 dollar hair cuts right? This seems to be how HR thinks. They seem to roll out new superficial benefits like these all the time without ever addressing the actual hard realities that they are being paid to solve. If HR can get its benefits package's value a few more zeroes behind it, then maybe people will actually blink before accepting another job offer. - Perhaps the surest warning sign that Enova is not what it's hyped up to be is the number of people and the kinds of people who are leaving. This year, those leaving is no longer contained to the lower band employees at the analyst and associate levels. A non-trivial number in management and leadership roles have left both from the business side and from the tech side. What's more interesting, is where those in management roles leave to. A little bit of digging reveals that a lot have gone to two of Enova's direct competitors this year. These competitors not only operate in the same industry as Enova, but also share a common pedigree as being comprised of former Enova leadership. Perhaps the old days of Enova when they were in charge were truly great times, and the ex-managers at Enova, remembering the good times under the old executive leadership, have left to join companies that still resemble Enova at its height circa 2010.