Pros
* Enova is a good place to develop early on in one's career in tech. They have a lot of new grads and less experienced hires coming through regularly, and so they've invested quite a bit in training and support for those folks. Managers have an expectation of developing less experienced folks and promoting them to Senior Engineer roles often within 2-3 years, so it can be a real resume builder. * The work-life balance is quite relaxed. Most folks stop working pretty promptly at 5, if not earlier, and "death marches" are exceedingly rare. The core business is quite profitable and has been for a long time, so there's not generally massive time pressure to launch new features or products. Most engineers are expected to be on call periodically, but on most teams that isn't a particularly significant burden. * The office environment is pretty good when it's available. Most folks are friendly, and there's a good number of social events with low barriers to entry that make it easy to meet new people. * Individual engineers generally have a significant amount of say in what they want to work on. Management is pretty accommodating with rotating people to teams aligned with their interests, and there are plenty of opportunities to pursue "passion" projects as long as they generally align with the company's goals.
Cons
* Senior leadership almost never seems to be on the same page, and who exactly is in charge of which initiatives and teams is in a seemingly constant state of flux. This leads to a lot of factional bickering between different teams as to who is supposed to be responsible for which work. * The "agile best practices" have almost nothing to do with proper agile development and are largely bureaucratic make-work for the purpose of making fun looking graphs. * The technology department has grown significantly in the last couple of years and there are some growing pains there in terms of diverging expectations about different roles. * Individual engineering freedom combined with lack of a coherent top level vision for technology has lead to a bit of a patchwork of random technologies at this point. Standardization of tools is sorely lacking, and very few folks in management have the backbone to tell their engineers "no". * Management has difficulty when it comes to career development for senior individual contributors. If you don't want to be a manager, the career path gets murky rather quickly. * The recent acquisition and onboard of OnDeck Capital has been an unmitigated disaster, and has a lot of folks within the org burned out. * Compensation and Benefits have historically been reasonably competitive within Chicagoland, but recently have started to fall significantly behind. * Messaging around the pandemic and work from home has been consistently inconsistent. I know this is an area where a lot of places are struggling now, but it definitely could be improved.
