DraftKings reviews

3.8

70% would recommend to a friend

(886 total reviews)
avatar

Jason Robins

78% approve of CEO

62% positive business outlook

DraftKings has an employee rating of 3.8 out of 5 stars, based on 886 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The DraftKings 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

886 reviews
3.0
Jan 1, 2025

Accelerating downhill

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Summary: If you are staring your career as SE, DK is a good place. Anyone else, you deserve better. When I joined DK, I absolutely loved it. The best culture in tech with relatively decent salary. I used to brag to my friends how great the culture was. It's still acceptable but the future is not looking good.

Cons

Last couple years, the culture has declined a lot. The new CTO loves Amazon culture (without FAANG level pay), driving the company to insanity. Most talented engineers left or are planning to leave soon. The people are nice and kind most of the time. But, politics is so bad these days. If you are okay with the morality, know how to play politics, are ok with peanuts TC, be a yes person, DK would be a great place for you. If you do join, tread with caution, have a paper trail for every conversation you have with managers or anything performance related. They will gaslight you and kick you out otherwise.

2.0
Dec 26, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Brand recognition when you tell people where you work - Easier interview than MAANG - People are generally good - Benefits were above average - Pay, when you consider equity, is great unless you were hired when the stock was sky high.

Cons

- Engineering decision making is almost completely in the hands of people who have just been there forever and have not kept up with technology. - Legacy code everywhere. They hired new grads in the beginning and you can tell. - They do not value technical aptitude. Rather than optimize code, they will spend a fortune on AWS to compensate for poor performance - Architecture team is elitist and not nearly as talented as they think, they force their poorly written middleware on the entire company. - New CTO dubiously qualified and focused on cutting costs over people - Entire leadership obsessed with profit with shareholders as the priority over ethics and loyalty. - Few if any RSU refreshers now so on year 5 comp will nosedive. They replaced it with an ESPP lol - Impossible to get promoted for real, they will put you in a higher role, but not change your title or your pay. If you want to get promoted, there is an extreme approval process that involves your manager and team making the case to promote you to a leadership panel and you are expected to have been doing the job you want to be promoted to over a year. - Recently has begun "silent layoffs" terminating higher earners for "performance" out of nowhere. - When they fire people, they ambush the shocked employee, especially if the termination reason is pretextual - I have been talking to senior technical employees on slack only to see them marked "Deactivated" in the middle of the day mid-conversation. I also noted that management didn't discuss it with the team. - On that note, people who joined the company advanced WAY too fast when it was the startup so you have a lot of bad managers and directors that got their role by default and they never leave and have job security no matter how badly they perform. - Oddly, half of the company is located in Bulgaria including the team that handles a lot of PaaS and devops so if you need those types, and you will, good luck getting help on that. My team just said f*ck it and learned to do our own devops. - DBAs are understaffed and asked to do things above their skillset which has lead to some performance issues and unreliable, non-ACID compliance despite AWS hosting. - again, legacy code and poor code quality/stanards universally - Critical onboarding information not documented anywhere but retained by long term employees in "tribal knowledge"

avatar
DraftKings Response
1y
Thank you for sharing your candid feedback about your experience at DraftKings. We regret to hear about the challenges you encountered. Your comments regarding communication and team support are issues we take seriously as we aim to foster an inclusive and collaborative environment, with clear communication and opportunities for career growth. Thank you again for your feedback.
2.0
May 16, 2024

House of Cards

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

• Compensation and benefits are competitive. • Option to work remotely is good.

Cons

• Project management practices are sloppy, inefficient and do not accurately account for the scope of most tasks • Managers are aloof and inattentive to team needs and project requirements. The status quo is preferred over meaningful improvements. • There is a culture that prioritizes processes above people and stifles creative collaboration between teams. • Stay in your lane, don't think for yourself, do as your told, conformity • Expectations for performance are poorly communicated and goal posts are constantly shifting. • You are evaluated against a set of core values that may not even be relevant to your job making it difficult to link your output to anything used to measure for success.

Viewing 22 - 24 of 886 Reviews

Glassdoor has 988 DraftKings reviews submitted anonymously by DraftKings employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if DraftKings is right for you.