I recently joined Lucidworks via acquisition as a consultant. It's already clear that I won't succeed here:
1. The product is half-baked demoware. Lucidworks started as a consultancy and, while they shifted to Product ~7 years ago, they cannot shake their history. The product is nothing more than a consulting accelerator for a handful of highly specialized people who know how to administer and use it: namely, a few Lucidworks employees with years of Solr and Fusion scars who know all of the undocumented ins and outs.
2. Sales specs projects and makes promises or product overstatements that the delivery team has no chance of delivering without massive change orders.
3. Every engagement starts with a painful lifting of the veil where I have to tell customers what they actually bought. We are doomed before we touch the keyboard.
4. Engineering doesn't provide adequate field support. It seems as though Engineering decides what suffices as Product without early field input and with no interest in feedback from the field. It's very much a "Here it is. I don't want to hear feedback. Good luck making your customer successful." attitude. Don't ask for documentation (figure it out). Don't ask for a feature (feature requests come from closed door meetings among a select few). Don't ask for a bug fix (there are no bugs). Don't ask for help (your job is to implement the solution; do it). Don't raise any issues (get in line or get another job).
5. There's a divide between senior management and the rest of us. You are either a "leader" or one of leadership's cronies spouting lies all day, or one of The Rest who hates it at Lucidworks and has no chance of succeeding in the toxic environment leadership has created.
6. Company values are a sham.The people team's official values are about openness, support, and honor; meanwhile, the CEO shoots from the hip and has instilled a silent "get on my wagon or you're fired" mantra. I won't raise any of these issues with my manager because there's too much recent layoff evidence suggesting that if you assert an uncomfortable opinion, you get fired.
