Pretty Exterior, Broken Underneath
Pros
When you tell your friends and family where you work, they will inevitably say "oh wow that's so cool, yeah I heard about that company on tv somewhere!".; the company's PR team is earning every penny it's being paid. ICON looks like a really cool company doing great things and doing it well, from the outside. I had a lot of fun doing lots of different things during my time and I did grow my skillset. Compensation was fair while I worked there, and as someone who was part of the 30% layoff in January 2023, I found the severance really generous. They didn't have to give us 12 weeks, but they did (I suspect they were just copying FAANG, but whatever, I'll take it).
Cons
#1 most important point is that this company cannot deliver what it's promised its customers. I don't see any way it can possibly meet its volume and deadline commitments, and I don't believe this company will survive. If you are considering a job here, understand this is a construction company masquerading as a tech company. ICON believes it's in the same category as FAANG while in reality most of its employees are doing hard physical labor. This leads to a culture that doesn't prioritize worker safety or humane work conditions, because it's behaving as if its workers aren't outside in harsh weather beating up their bodies over long overtime shifts. Instead they're trying to copy FAANG companies and software startup culture, which is inhumane applied to people who aren't software engineers. Others have covered the weird Tesla/SpaceX worship so I won't go into that. From an employee perspective, I saw a spike in people being fired during the lead-up to the layoff. How is it possible that, all of a sudden, so many people were underperforming when they'd been doing great for months or years? It was like a switch flipped on around September 2022 and suddenly there was continuous firings. It was underhanded, suspicious, and unethical. I suspect the company tried to fix its financial situation by spiking up the firing, and then turned to the mass layoff when it realized it couldn't possibly "fire for performance" quickly enough to fix it. All those canaries in the coal mine who got fired without severance in the months running up to the layoff -- it wasn't right what happened to you. I read all the other reviews here on Glassdoor and I'm not seeing anything I disagree with or think is overblown. If you have an interview to work at ICON, read everything here and think about it deeply.
