DataSift Software Engineer reviews

3.6

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(2 total reviews)

Tim Barker

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2 reviews
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

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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!
3.0
Jan 8, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great place with some interesting and smart technical people. The concept of social media analytics as a service is interesting, though not as compelling. Fun place to work too. Lots of character within the office which made the hard work enjoyable. Fast moving environment.

Cons

Ex-gamer former CTO/CEO tried to run it like a gaming dev house. Crunching to meet artificial deadlines, little thanks for lots of work. Naive belief that C++ was the only game in town for 'high performance' though C++ modules were some of the least performing and least reliable aspects of the platform. Some technical people not as good as they believe, I've seen much better since leaving from much humbler people.

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DataSift Response
10y
Thanks for the feedback. I'll take it into consideration. 100% agree on humble and hungry. I'm not going to debate the merits of C++ vs others on this thread... but i agree with your sentiment that modern stacks are heterogeneous. Aligning the company to a compelling event like a market/product launch or industry event ("Crunching to meet artificial deadlines) is pretty much a standard for every company on the planet. I've personally found these rally the whole company and help create the fast moving environment that you enjoyed. But just don't take this to the extreme. We aim to do monthly releases so we maintain a cadence of predictability and momentum. Without setting a stake in the ground on a deadline, the temptation is to expand scope, push dates, and lose predictability.

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