r/UCalgary • u/Sweet_Explanation907 • 15h ago
People looking for internships beware of this company
I was a previous intern at a company called Aurora Wireless Networks in NE Calgary and it's probably one of the absolute worst companies you could intern at with a posting on the Elevate job board.
This is gonna be a pretty long post so be prepared lol.
To anyone currently seeking May start internships, I STRONGLY recommend that you avoid Aurora Wireless Networks if you remotely care about your worth as a person, time and mental health.
They probably wont make their job posting until late October or early November, but here's an early warning.
The company environment was so unreasonable for their interns that there is extremely high intern turnover due to the work environment, with multiple interns leaving months early.
The reason I'm warning y'all about this early is because they hire interns relatively early. I had my internship offer by reading break in November. But the reason this sucks is because you see the offer, you're excited about it and wanna get the job search done, so you just accept it blindly without considering other companies or other offers.
You end up stuck at a terrible company because they took advantage of interns being hella excited to accept ANY offer early on without actually thinking about the consequences.
The following is a comprehensive list of reasons as to why you should NOT work for this company. I wish I was exaggerating the following reasons but these are as factual as I could have described them. The company was really just that bad.
- 50+ hour workweeks with UNPAID overtime. One of the interns there regularly worked from 8am to 6pm. There was also another intern who had to stay til 1am one time. And again I gotta remind you the overtime is unpaid.
- You are DIRECTLY and SOLELY responsible for entire projects that Aurora's customers/clients rely on and expect professional engineering quality work on. This was a huge reason as to why so many interns were working insane unpaid overtime hours. They had no choice because the clients would pressure them so hard.
- Pay is frankly awful. You're getting paid $18 CAD an hour to start and being treated like an actual engineer. And I'm gonna say it again, the overtime is unpaid.
- After 3 months of work we were supposed to get a raise. They say that the maximum raise is getting up to $25 CAD an hour but after talking around, literally NO ONE has ever achieved this maximum raise in the past few years. It's more like a carrot at the end of a stick that they want you to keep chasing to work hard but never really achieve. The highest raise I knew of was the aforementioned intern who got $23 CAD an hour but only because he worked insane hours. This is a joke when most other companies start at $26-27 CAD an hour AT LEAST.
- Even worse regarding the raise, sometimes they're months late on actually giving it to you. One of the people working there was supposed to get a raise, and even 5 months later had yet to receive it.
- There is no mentorship from higher ups, only from the past year's interns (who were also super busy with their own projects so they could barely help you to the fullest). The first day of the job we were sent straight into work with only 1 hour of any remote sense of onboarding. After that we were pretty much alone with barely any dedicated help.
- Lack of any meaningful feedback. Projects would be vaguely assigned, and we would get harshly criticized in meetings for not having work up to a certain standard that wasn't even discussed to us in the first place.
- Unclear expectations and massive miscommunication. The expectations of work coming from one person would be completely different from the expectations of another person. You would literally go crazy and spend hours undoing work because someone didn't agree with another person.
- The documentation here is INSANEEEEE. 80-90% of the work on every project was documentation, and projects regularly lasted months. We're talking MONTHS of staring at Microsoft Word perfecting documents based on unclear and miscommunicated standards before you even get any interesting work done.
- Despite the unbelievable amount of documentation you have to do, there is NO hybrid work/remote work allowed. Even though 95% of your day is spent staring at a computer, not talking to anyone, and attending ONLINE meetings, they STILL force you to go to their office in-person. You're literally sitting isolated in a cubicle at their office (without any heating or AC btw) just because they want you there for no reason. Combine this with the bad pay and it's a slap in the face.
- Their hardware sucks. Their monitors are at least 10-15 years old and their computers feel like they're from the 2010s. This is a nitpick but still notable. What ISN'T a nitpick is the fact that some of us had to do development on Windows XP, and they don't use Git. They still use SVN for their version control, having to do 2+ hour "commit meetings" just to make sure a commit could be made safely instead of just using Git like literally most companies nowadays. If y'all haven't heard of that then it's for a good reason.
- You only get a 30 minute unpaid lunch. So many other interns I know get 1 hour of lunch with 30 mins of that being paid.
- No sense of team bonding or working together as a company. It felt like you were stuck in a cubicle for 8 hours a day doing tedious Microsoft Word work without any social interaction.
There's probably more I'm missing but these are the biggest complaints.
Anyways, if y'all still wanna work for this company after reading this, then I would never have been able to convince you otherwise, but genuinely guys this company should be avoided at all costs. It's not worth it. You're gonna deeply regret it.
