Sep 5, 2018
Okta Software Developer reviews
4.2
96% would recommend to a friend
Todd McKinnon
95% approve of CEO
83% positive business outlook
Software Developer employees have rated Okta with 4.2 out of 5 stars, based on 51 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Software Developer professionals have an excellent working experience there. Okta is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Software Developer professionals compared to other employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).
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Reviews by job title
51 reviews
4.0
Jul 25, 2017
Good challenges, growth opportunities, great pay, very nice office
Current employee, more than 1 year
Toronto, ON
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook
Pros
- Great co-workers, lots of smart people, though most of your team members will likely be at HQ in San Francisco or San Jose - New Toronto office is very nice, with good perks. - Toronto co-workers are great, from a breadth of different teams - Very flexible hours, and work from home once a week - Excellent base pay - Honest and candid leadership - Recognition is given regularly and properly. Lots of opportunity for growth. Well-defined career tracks (technical & management) - People, in its great majority, put a genuine effort in improving what's not good enough
Cons
- Benefits (especially vacation) are very basic, even when they didn't have to be - to the point of being annoying sometimes - HR and workplace management are all in HQ (San Francisco), so getting their attention on many of the pain points around benefits/office issues can be very challenging - Work/life balance can be tricky with a Pacific-Time based team - Complicated dev environment & monolithic architecture of the product sometimes complicate the simplest of tasks - Not the fastest brand of agile is followed in the dev process
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.
Viewing 43 - 45 of 51 Reviews
