Highly ineffective, overpaid, weird McKinsey fascination - Solutions Manager C3 AI Employee Review

1.0
Jul 27, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Talent at the IC level is high - Comp is competitive - Onsite lunch/gym are a nice park

Cons

- Weak management chain. Apart from sucking up to a boomer CEO and repeating outdated McKinsey management tropes, I'm not sure what value anyone with a Director+ title brings at C3 AI. - Overpaid exec staff. Our annual losses would be wiped out if we didn't pay our top 3-4 execs. - 5 days in person imo has been more detrimental than 4-day hybrid. - People are burnt out, stressed, exhausted, and management looks the other way. - Attrition is worse than I've ever seen at a tech company. - Routine end-of-quarter mass layoffs - Full-time employees are being replaced with ineffective contractors - I have personally been thrown under the bus by an exec in front of a customer so they could save face.

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C3 AI Response
1y
We find it perplexing that someone would complain about a work from office culture after they have told us explicitly it is their preference. We make it very clear during the interview and job offer process that C3 AI is a highly collaborative, high-performance, work from office culture. All candidates who are made job offers tell us that they prefer work-from-office to hybrid or work-from-home.

Explore other reviews about C3 AI

5.0
Jul 3, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Best team I worked with. Keep learning new tech.

Cons

Not too much. Company is still not profit.

2.0
Jun 1, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Smart and talented colleagues with strong problem-solving skills. Opportunity to work on large-scale enterprise applications for Fortune 500 customers across industries such as manufacturing, supply chain, energy, and defense. Exposure to AI/ML-driven business applications and complex data integration challenges. Fast-paced environment with significant ownership and opportunities to contribute across the stack. Employees on platform and infrastructure teams can gain experience with distributed systems, backend services, and core platform development. Competitive compensation and exposure to high-impact customer-facing projects.

Cons

Much of the application development work relies on C3.ai's proprietary Type System and platform abstractions rather than widely adopted industry frameworks. Skills gained in some application-focused roles may not transfer as directly to companies that primarily use Java, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, AWS-native services, or other mainstream technologies. Engineers looking to build expertise in designing scalable systems from scratch may find fewer opportunities, as many platform capabilities are already provided by the underlying framework. Technical growth can vary significantly depending on the team. Platform teams often work with core technologies, while application teams may spend more time configuring and extending existing platform functionality. The learning curve for the internal platform can be steep, and much of that knowledge is specific to the C3.ai ecosystem. Career development and marketability outside the company may depend heavily on the nature of the projects and teams an engineer is assigned to.

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