Pros
- CEO and most of the executive team: Todd McKinnon is a phenomenal CEO. The rest of the executive team are highly-competent people who favor execution over wild ideas. - People: We've done a great job adding only the best. Unfortunately, this bar has been lowered for more recent engineers. Overall, people like each other and are a joy to work with. This was not the case at Okta two years ago. - Salary: Overall salary is a little on the low-side, but not terrible. Equity is a different story. - Work from home Thursday: A great perk. Taking care of the kids, house-cleaning, picking up dinner, taking things to the repair shop, all of these things are made easier by this one perk. Probably my favorite policy. - Some fantastic managers: Some teams have some great managers who do a great job. - Your equity will be worth something one day: The company is doing great. Market leader in a field that you created. - Interesting problems: You get ownership over large projects and drive them entirely to completion. Great learning experience.
Cons
- Executive team: The executive team has people who nitpick, have favorites, and hold grudges against people in their organization. - Dog-eat-dog world for individual contributors: If you don't pull your own weight, you will be fired. Quickly. The stack is not the easiest stack to ramp up on, so buyer beware. - Political world for management: There are grossly incompetent managers in engineering as well, which directly affects morale. Managers compete with each other for engineers, which means engineers can move from team to team. - Team mobility: This means core teams that work with difficult architectural decisions or have to deal with the customers get depleted over time, resulting in sweeping reorganizations every couple of months to re-staff these teams. You never really get settled on a team before you get switched to another team. - Empty promises: There have been several cases where teams or individuals get promised certain perks from management and never get them. It breed mis-trust in management. - Customer-driven to a fault: Customers are the number one priority at Okta. Which is great for the customers, but engineering feels the backlash when you get dragged into complex problems by other managers, who rarely give any recognition for helping them out. - Perks: Really not up to snuff with other companies in San Francisco. I understand that we're saving up after the series E to have extra ramp to IPO, but would it kill us to add gym membership? Or matching 401K? - Low Equity: Compared to other similar-sized companies, Okta is very stingy with equity. I have no doubt that we are losing out on great candidates because of this. - Training: What training?
