Flexential reviews

-Leadership is terrible. There is no growth to professional services and it feels at times that they are trying to get rid of the proserv department. -You get overloaded with work quickly. Because pay is so poor, good engineers leave and hiring process is extremely slow. This means engineers are getting overloaded with work and deadlines are pretty much unmovable. -Someone thought it was a good idea to silo everyone off into specific parts of professional services, ie devops, networking, etc. Thats all you get to work on. Forever. Instead of getting to work on cool projects, you are left with just doing the same thing every day. It was then realized silos were a bad idea. That person is still in charge today. -Its rare to see leadership around, even with a pandemic when engineers needed to see leadership the most, they were not around. This forced morale to decrease so much that multiple managers, directors, etc all left during a pandemic. Promotions did not happen within the company, which further decreased morale. -Pro is unlimited PTO, con? Good luck getting approved with the amount of engineers that have left and the numerous projects on the table. -401k benefits were taken away because the company was running out of money after leadership said everything would be okay. Then you see the CEO Chris Downie traveling first class everywhere with no word on when benefits would be coming back. -Theres no trust. Good luck making a mistake because you would immediately be made to feel like a failure. Instead of helping engineers out, it was made to be a one for all company with having to bill a certain number of hours per week.

The combined entity of Flexential has lost its identity. Peak 10 was a great, growing, vibrant company with an awesome culture of "Let's get our work done and have fun while doing it." My understanding of ViaWest was that they enjoyed a very similar culture. On paper, the merger of two companies of roughly the same size, with similar products and separate geographies seemed ideal. The end result was (and still is) a much more challenging situation than I think any of use could see. I tried, and was ultimately not successful in helping to navigate these changes. I ultimately left feeling like I could not longer impact the company in a positive way, and therefore it was time to move on, before I became another anchor to progress. Unlimited PTO sounds like a great concept, but when you are running 24x7 operations, it is difficult to implement and manage. HR's guidance was to mange by holding employees accountable to business objectives. Again on paper, that sounds ideal. In practice, where I have to fill every shift, what that means is I end up having to encounter overtime to fill those shifts vacated by staff on PTO. My staff don't get dinged for that, but I did. There is a mismatch between what we experience at the local data center level and what the executives at either corporate location experience. It is almost a world of haves and have nots.