Cloudflare reviews

You're a second-class citizen whose day-to-day experience will mostly depend on the maturity of your team and the capability of your manager - both vary wildly between micro- and absentee management. Even with a great team, the best employees tend to put in 2 years and leave, and only a handful stay past the 4 year mark. People are never prioritized over the increasingly unfocused mission of re-inventing the Internet. The management layer is a dangerous mix of inexperienced and underpowered. Many are overly concerned with how they are perceived by their bosses due to the cult of personality at the very top. Many are powerless as a lot of key day-to-day decisions are still filtered through the executive team. Headcount, compensation, and even final interviews still flow through the top. So, even a solid manager requires final approval from above them for any decision that really matters. This means many teams are understaffed and employees find themselves overworked and underpaid. Problems tend to get hidden instead of surfaced, become technical debt and just pile up until things start breaking. The company very accurately "lurches from one incident to another" as one reviewer put it, and the employees are the ones that have to clean up each and every mess.

It was a very disappointing experience that I hope it will never be repeated ever again in my career. I have been promised a senior SRE job to find out that SRE at Cloudflare actually means watching some screens and when it blinks, click a button to open a page, from where you copy a set of instructions to paste them into your terminal. Not only that the job descriptions are highly misleading, but it's certainly not a good place if you want to grow. Other than a theoretical description thrown on a piece of paper, there are very, very few genuine senior positions. The culture is equally bad, everyone is afraid of the CEO, which, also shows it frequently in public, is a very narcissist person. He's also the one that decides your salary, and usually the offer he makes you is non-negociable. Get used to this, as after you join, this is going to be the pattern: whatever he says, you only have to say "yes", or you can be fired if you disagree! Generally speaking, the higher ups have an obvious lack of previous experience in terms of management, and they understand management as a form of kingdom, they being the ones giving orders and the rest have to execute. After arguing a few times with a manager, when they run out of arguments for his terrible idea (which everyone disagreed with), he shouted: "just do it as I said". Not to mention that there's no such thing as equality, definitely not an equal chance employer: if you kiss the right place you're privileged (and the whitelist is pretty short), otherwise they know how to make it a cold place for you. You cannot attend a conference or a training to help you develop your skills, unless you speak. This is understandable up to an extent, but engineers typically have a strong desire to learn and expand their skill set. They don't offer anything in this direction. The list of benefits is incredibly short and poor, rather offensive. Leaving, was the best decisions in my career. I left shortly after I joined, being unhappy that there was a huge mismatch between what I've been promised and what I've actually been offered. At the interviews they make it looks like "hey we're all friends here" to find out how much decoupled are the teams, in reality. The bottom line is: they don't need creative engineers, but robots that only execute orders and don't argue or have opinions / ideas.