Spigen Reviews

This company is rife with abuse, toxic management and more. I'll start all the way from the beginning with recruitment. Recruitment: I came across a job posting they had for their junior engineers, and it said 2+ years of professional experience required for an entry level position. After a week or so I got a response from their HR department. However, the company doesn't respect your time from the get go. They made me wade through useless general skills online where it tested you on english vocab and comprehension. Then after an entire week later they asked me to complete a hacker rank assessment. Only then after that around a week later I was invited on for an onsite. The interview was with their senior executive, but it was mostly about if I could speak Korean, and went over my resume. Then after a week or two they called me for another interview with HR. This is where I was having the rug pulled underneath me. From the get go they said that we won't be able to sponsor you, and asked me about my salary expectations. I went with fair market data according to the market rate for entry-level developers for Irvine which has a very high cost of living. I answered with 85k and they said it was too high, and there's no room to negotiate. After the interview, a couple of days later I received an offer letter through docusign; however, this was when I realized it was a massive bait and switch. What I thought was a full-time position was sneakily changed into a part time position, except I'd be working the same hours for only 20 dollar hours, which is roughly 40k a year. They knew I was desperate because of my visa status as a foreign student and took advantage of that. This ends the recruitment segment. The Job: The actual job was disorganized and had us fulfilling non-relevant work such as fixing printers, managing the tech storage closet and setting up computers for new employees. Of course this was alongside coding tasks that we're already trying to match to a ridiculous schedule. The first impressions of the computer were not good at all. The team blatantly had no code reviews, and barely a unified code base. You might ask did they do testing or documentation? Nope. The coding involved was an absolute mess at the beginning with no sense of engineering culture involved. They hired three junior engineers without even a senior engineer to generate a large-scale distributed project. The absolute lack of knowledge on what it takes to make a project was astounding. Only after they hired a senior engineer did we have a semblance of what to do in terms of the project. However, even this was an absolute mess with constantly changing requirements, ridiculous timelines, and massive amounts of extra work pushed on. Furthermore, we still had no semblance of engineering culture, where we actually would test code and review them before committing. Forget about even having any semblance of mentorship here when everyone is too busy with their own work. Did I also mention that almost 90% of the workforce is Korean? I don't know how they managed to squeeze pass anti-discrimination labor laws especially in the U.S. There's barely any diversity or inclusion. The work culture is also toxic, where when I had my first large chunk of overtime I had to stay till 11 p.m. The next day I expressed my complaints regarding overtime, and my supervisor snootily responded with "you haven't worked real overtime until you've seen the sun come up in the morning". Just absolute condescension based on age. Furthermore, the comments and the interactions were very much a cliché, with even one coworker during the start of COVID making a racist remark regarding Chinese people to which the supervisors just glossed over. Everyone on the team were pulling insane work hours and overtime was common. Plus working on the weekends were expected and became a lot more common for some team members. Funnily enough it seemed to always only be the junior engineers and the senior engineer, with management just enjoying their weekends. Remote Policy, Benefits, and Pay: During the height of the pandemic when orange county was in red level alert, there was strong managerial pressure on pushing people to come back to the office, despite the situation growing worse alongside. Some employees had to directly make a complaint to HR and management regarding the total lack of concern for the health and safety for the employees and only after fighting did we receive some approval with a target on our backs. The reason why we fought so hard was because for part timers (despite working the same hours) is that we had no healthcare, no benefits, and just three sick days. With healthcare costs in the U.S and with our meager pay it would have been disastrous for those involved to catch covid. Furthermore, some employees actually did catch COVID-19 and still came into work endangering their coworkers around them. HR hushed the entire situation but the story was leaked soon and any employees that were near that individual had to quarantine for two weeks. Even after all this hubbub the company has still not learned its lesson and has mandated employees to come back without vaccine mandates. When we actually went remote, we had 2 stand ups a day, alongside one time where they experimented with an always on voice chatroom, which shows they don't trust their employees. Regarding benefits despite being advertised as a full-time position it seemed to be only offered to citizens, and for anyone on a perfectly legal and valid work visa were relegated to part-timers. The worst part was when we had federal holidays like thanksgiving or christmas, we wouldn't get paid because we were "part-time". Forget about vacation days also. Plus within the internal self-service system we were regarded as Interns. Furthermore, I can't believe this but when we got a yearly pay raise, I received a raise from 20/hr to 21/hr. Eventually us junior developers were offered to have our green cards sponsored; however the catch was that we would have front the enormous costs of sponsorship + legal fees which would be roughly 10k. That would have been fine alone, but it was the fact that they said we need more time left on our visa and would have to enroll in a master program to extend our visa, of course with ourselves paying the bill on the program and having to attend and work simultaneously. Conclusion: I had been diagnosed with depression before all this, but I'm very sure joining this company had only made it worse. When I was able to use my healthcare finally for mental health I had gained an anxiety disorder and worsened major depression. This company is toxic, a lot of the senior members are incompetent and with no one to learn from junior member aren't able to pick up good habits or technical skills opting for self-learning in lieu of best practices. To demonstrate one case, when presenting a report that utilizing google's translation api would cost a certain amount, the senior developer suggested we create our own translation service with machine learning. We were dumbfounded at the callous suggestion and had to explain the near impossibility with the scale of the cost and lack of manpower. Remember this was a team of 3 jr backend developers, 1 front end engineer, 1 senior backend engineer, 1 senior frontend engineer and 1 project manager. We had a total of 4 actual coding members with the seniors off doing their own thing most of the time. Finally to anyone joining the company or who are interested. I genuinely can not see any future in this project. There's no room for growth, the needs are superfluous alongside the market cap of this software being incredibly small, where we only target other e-commerce sellers on features that are already supported by Amazon, Ebay and others. Furthermore, there's no room for growth. And very "suspicious" that a huge majority of the work force are interns shipped in from South Korea or people like us with F-1 student visas. I'm glad to be away from such a toxic work environment. I'd genuinely rather be unemployed than work here again. (I have complied with Glassdoor's review policy by avoiding discriminatory language, profanities, and other confidential information)