Pros
Free snacks and beverages in the kitchen
Cons
It's a lousy leadership company suffering from favoritism and the lack of innovations First, the company stock has dropped almost twice since going public, and if you’d like to become reach on this stock, keep dreaming. The stock might go up, if the market goes up, and go down, if the market goes down. There are couple reasons for it - the company is developing a commodity product, which has no advantages compared to other enterprise storages, and a lot of work is outsourced to China, because there is almost no intellectual innovation in the product. By the way, the company is still not profitable. Second, the company performance suffers from favoritism. A lot of employees have been dragged by their former bosses from their previous companies. These favorites can do and say anything they want, and if you don’t want to get in trouble, keep low-profile for a year or two until you deserve your right to be heard. Most of the time these “favorites” keep mimicking activity in various meetings and don’t produce any real innovations. For example, I knew one engineer, who didn’t commit a single meaningful line of code for couple months and received bonus at the attestation for providing unquantifiable” services for the team. Please know that your career growth really depends on whether you get into one of the “favorite group” or not. It has nothing to do with your performance. For instance, I remember that at the beginning of the year, a couple of Sr. Managers have been promoted to Directors. Both of them are, of course, the company veterans, and are famous with their ability to talk for hours about nothing. None of them, of course, couldn’t even write a more than two-page document or a one-page-length schedule. They simply could not focus on a single task if it took more than 15 minutes. To me, they are both useless for the company, but the VP loved them for their ability to say smart things in the meetings, and they got their promos. Third, be careful, as some people have personal relationship at work. At the beginning of the year, one manager from sales was fired due to inappropriate conduct with his direct report during the company ski trip. However, another manager from their HW division regularly spends time, including overnight time, with his direct report on a ski resort and is able to get away with it. He even got his promotion this year (see section about about favoritism). Fourth, the HR is a joke. They spend all time doing different surveys and talks, like “how can we make your life better?” or “tell me who makes your life harder.” Many employees use them as a way for revenge, because the HR never verifies anything. They just meet with victims of gossips and try to implicate them what they may have never done… I’ve never seen a company in my life, where people were complaining so much about each other. HR, which encourages such behavior, is one of the biggest reasons of the problem. Fifth, the hiring process favors friends of the current employees. To get hired you need to pass several coding interviews, where you’ll be given a task. The interviewer is trained for a single task that is taken from a special pool of tasks, and the interviewer can never change it. The pool of tasks is known and rarely changes, and all company veterans/favorites know how to get access to it. That’s why a lot of new hires, who came by invitation, pass the interviews without problems, because they knew all tasks before the interview. Now here is the story of my employment. I worked for a man who couldn’t pull the trigger on a project, ever. I would bring him a request with all the supporting documentation. He would ask me to rerun it. When I came back, he would want it rerun again, and again. It was like an endless doom loop of frustration. I could never get him off the dime. By the time he approved it, the opportunity was lost, and he would blame me for missing it. It was utterly dispiriting. VP and director level managers didn’t have enough confidence to lead at their level. The boss I mentioned at the start was like this. He couldn’t decide because he had no faith in his decisions. The leadership was disorganized. I’ve worked with some hard-driving, capable leaders who hamstrung themselves by never getting organized. I reported to one leader like this. Their words and actions eroded trust, even with their supporters. You could never count on them. They didn’t hold people accountable—especially themselves. If a leader avoids responsibility and won’t hold their team accountable, they’ll shipwreck the organization. Accountability is essential! Also, my boss enjoyed creating dramas. Probably, it gave him feeling of personal significance, because every problem was a huge issue for him. He could rant for hours about how everything around is imperfect. Of course, he never bothered to notice that he himself didn’t really bring any real value for the company.
