Okta reviews

3.6

63% would recommend to a friend

(1,659 total reviews)
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Todd McKinnon

70% approve of CEO

60% positive business outlook

Okta has an employee rating of 3.6 out of 5 stars, based on 1,659 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Okta employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

2K reviews
3.0
Nov 3, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Okta is a good company. The people mean well and try to live by it. Todd McKinnon and Freddy have done a phenomenal job building out the company to where it is now. The product is a leader in identity management. Quite frankly, if you have SSO, MFA, or just need a more extensible LDAP, you would be a fool to not consider Okta top-of-mind. The company is winning big and making money. The engineers are talented. Perhaps not the most talented group I've worked with, but they get the job done. The top-end of the talent is very high, and there are sufficient paths for growth in both engineering and management leadership. If you do your job, the promotions will come. Okta tries hard to be fair in compensating you according to the market. You will not be under-paid, but Okta will not go out-of-band to make sure you are exceptionally well-compensated. If you want to learn about how to grind out and build up an enterprise SaaS company, there is no better place. Okta will instill in you respect for process and why/when they get added. How to get a flock of engineers to march to the same drummer and build products. You will have fire-support whenever you need it, but you need to own your feature, own your product, and own your career. Okta is building a mini-brand and other companies know about Okta. I can personally say that I can use my experience and my reputation as having worked at Okta at other enterprise SaaS companies with a surprising amount of leverage.

Cons

The mobility team is a mess. The engineering management lacks leadership and vision for how to evolve the product, grow the team, and effectively compete with the other OMM vendors. This is made worse by the incompetent product management there. Okta should have a tremendous advantage over the existing OMM vendors because it's anchored by the premier identity management and SSO product. It's an incredibly opportunity missed to dominate that vertical and Todd needs to shake that area up. Engineering managers by-and-large are not great. Greg (the VP) tries to do well but is the more or less the only engineering manager who has the skills needed to help grow a team. There are a couple others as well, but most of engineering management either lacks the emotional intelligence to understand how to keep engineers happy and productive, hands-off to an extreme, is really an engineer promoted far too fast, or has some other major flaw that keeps them from being an effective manager. Despite the fact that we have career tracks, career development is basically nonexistent in-so-far as working with managers to acquire new skills and build up careers. Luckily Okta has some fairly good technical leads and product leads for the teams, otherwise engineers would just spin in circles. Some attrition in a fast-growing company is acceptable and perhaps even desirable to get fresh blood in and open positions for them to grow into, but a lot of the attrition at Okta comes from bad management. That is a real bummer.

1.0
Oct 19, 2016

Poor Upper Management

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Free lunch mwf for HQ employees Flexible tine off

Cons

Unless you are an Engineer, do not apply here. Upper management has little insight or care about the work environment of customer facing roles, routinely asking employees to work 11+ hour days to try and accomplish the 16+ hours worth of work assigned to try and run the company at the pace upper management desires. Middle management achieved roles based on tenure at the company, not necessarily from performance. Company morale is low very little work life balance is a contributing factor. VERY high turnover.

1.0
Aug 16, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Is (or at least was) a category leader.

Cons

Culture of fear and paralysis. Fealty to CEO valued over performance, candor, work ethic. Company lacks culture or any cohesive set of values, and fails to "do the right thing" if doing so is not convenient. Example: I had to file litigation to collect on equity benefits I was entitled to under my employment contract. It took two years and thousands of dollars of attorneys' fees before I was ultimately victorious at trial - yes I had to literally take Okta all the way to a full jury trial to get what I was owed (which Okta tried to avoid on a technicality). Happily my 12-0 jury verdict took care of that. But wow,

Viewing 37 - 39 of 1,659 Reviews

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