DataSift reviews

4.0

69% would recommend to a friend

(22 total reviews)

Tim Barker

91% approve of CEO

59% positive business outlook

DataSift has an employee rating of 4.0 out of 5 stars, based on 22 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The DataSift employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

22 reviews
4.0
Dec 19, 2016

Ex employee

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great co-workers and work environment.

Cons

Multiple RIFs have affected morale.

4.0
Sep 29, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Made a lot of friends within the team. Would love to work with any of them again in the future - Great opportunity to learn about developing and deploying distributed systems - Free food/snacks means that people socialise at lunchtimes etc

Cons

- Zero career progression options - Stagnating product unless you're lucky enough to be chosen to spearhead the latest idea. Everyone else spends their time changing configuration files or fixing flaky tests for months on end - Most people have no faith in upper management. The best they hope for is that management keeps out of their way - Any grass-roots initiatives are "supported" but no time is allocated to them, meaning they die as fast as they start

avatar
DataSift Response
9y
Thanks for sharing your feedback. Not sure if you were here during the 1:1s that I did with every employee, but several of the topics you raise came up here. I'm focused on a few areas that I agree need improvement. In many ways, everything comes down to “empowerment”. The freedom and autonomy to work on what’s important, organise and approach problems that need addressing, set priorities, and execute on this. I believe organisational alignment on priorities as the foundation for this, but specifically in engineering, there are a few areas that need to come together to make this work, specifically : - organising the team for ‘ownership’: Earlier this year we re-organized engineering into ‘feature teams’ to help drive ownership (an engineering-driven initiative). All would agree, it’s certainly not delivered on driving ownership down to teams. We need to improve how we organize, likely into more fluid, product teams. - accountability: With ownership and empowerment comes accountability, and thereby predicability. Like many companies, Agile is a journey we are still on. I know accountability is a harsh word, maybe even an unpopular idea, but we are all in business to build and sell great things. Re: career development, I’ve personally always found the key to this to be through giving people big goals and objectives, and helping them when they stumble along the way. That’s not to say that external training courses etc aren’t important, but you don’t develop your career unless you are doing. I’ll continue to try my best to get the get group of individuals working and developing as a team. Good luck in the next stage of your career!
2.0
Sep 9, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

In Tim Barker, DataSift have an enigmatic and effective CEO. Whilst I feel that his installment (some time ago now) may be a case of too little too late, I think he is DataSift's best chance of success as the company faces significant challenges making a real success of their SaaS products.

Cons

DataSift has no direct competitors in the market and without competition, there are no external forces that are really testing the internal assertion that the company is building a world class software platform. A few years ago, the things DataSift were working on were perhaps fairly novel. However, the processing pipelines DataSift are developing have largely been commoditized by big players through the likes of AWS and Google's big data and stream processing offerings. DataSift's core technology (SaaS data stream processor deployed to physical servers) now looks a little antiquated in the context of what can be accomplished through more modern managed offerings from the big cloud platform players. To compound this problem, DataSift's biggest asset is has become its biggest risk I think: The commercial relationships with their data partners (eg Facebook) mean that usage of modern, managed offerings for stream processing are simply off the table. This enforces the continued use of more traditional, labour intensive, approaches and means that a lot of time is spent building and maintaining infrastructure components rather than focusing on true value adding software. This is a shame and the effect here is that the company's ability to deliver features that will really drive revenue is being limited.

Viewing 4 - 6 of 22 Reviews

Glassdoor has 22 DataSift reviews submitted anonymously by DataSift employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if DataSift is right for you.