SRE robots - Anonymous employee Cloudflare Employee Review

2.0
Sep 26, 2018
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

None that I can think of.

Cons

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.

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Cloudflare Response
7y
There's lots to unpack here. First off, we don't want anyone to be surprised when they take a job here. Our process is purposely structured not to be rushed so all potential new hires really understand the role and who they will be working with. It sounds like we failed to do that well here. As the Head of People, I'm probably closer to the compensation of all employees, including our offers, than anyone. I can tell you with absolute certainty our CEO is not determining the details of the offers. Salaries are pretty market driven, and thanks to all the hiring we do, we are very close to what the market is bearing. We use that, and other gold standard market surveys to make sure our comp remains competitive. I work with hiring managers to make sure we are putting our best foot forward with our offers, while keeping internal equity in mind. Matthew still sends out each and every offer letter with a nice email congratulating the potential new hire, and making himself available for questions as she makes her decision. While there are more scalable ways to send offer letters, they would be a lot less personable. Just because the offer comes from him, the details in it are certainly not dictated by him. We prioritize development and the well-being of all our employees. I'm sorry to read that wasn't your experience, and that you think the benefits fell short. We aren't perfect, but we are working hard to get better each day. We will use your feedback to improve. -janet

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