DataStax Employee Reviews about "work from home"

Pros

- Highly talented engineers, many with roots in the open source community, low egos and a tremendous desire to share; - Neither the newcomers, nor the senior employees are left without a clear action plan. There are multiple layers of expertise that will be happy to help. - Working from home; - Lots of sharing from leadership and management... that it got to the point where it's hard to keep up.

Cons

For bonding purposes, post Covid allow all remote employees to periodically meet their team members.

Pros

Work from home, decent pay, fine benefits

Cons

Toxic culture, two big layoffs within 6 months, CMO & CEO pushing out good employees to hire their friends. Company is struggling financially.

Pros

Excellent leadership all throughout the Engineering organization - this has resulted in (1) excellent engineering culture, (2) customer-first attitude, (3) **extremely** smart and friendly engineers, (4) an extremely collaborative culture, (5) work from home policy that works really, really well for both the engineers as well as the company, (6) actual work-life balance

Cons

I don't see any, as part of the Engineering team. I've worked in many, many silicon valley companies.

Pros

Distributed workforce culture means that even if you're based near an office, it's not an issue to work from home. Leadership takes employee satisfaction very seriously and values transparency. Lunch is catered (free!) at HQ every day. Company has good momentum and potential, backed by a great product.

Cons

Growing pains not unusual for a company of this size and stage. Turnover and problems with longevity for some key leadership roles in GTM. Messaging and marketing lacks consistency. It's rare to see lower level people being promoted.

Pros

* DataStax offers many opportunities to make an impact. Developers work on stuff that matters and they heavily influence the product. You don't have to be a product manager to get cool features in. Product management is open-minded. * Ability to work on very challenging, non-standard problems. This is not a CRUD type of work. This is the first company that I really feel my MS degree in CS matters. * I've been here for a very long time and it is hard to get bored. Even though I'm considered a senior, there is lot of stuff that I'm learning. The main product of DataStax has many different components and there is always a possibility to move to another team, temporarily or permanently, and learn new stuff. * Ability to work from home. This is a very important thing for me - I have kids and I can for example drive them back from school in the middle of the day or I can go to a doctor when most people are at work, so I don't wait in the line. I also don't waste time commuting. This way of working requires some self-discipline, so it might not work well for everybody, but it works great for me. * When you're at the office (we do have offices as well), you can grab a coffee with a manger or even a higher-level executive and talk openly about whatever you feel is wrong / needs improvement, without risking it backfires on you. You can talk like with a team-mate. * The company culture has self-improvement and openness baked in. Higher-level executive staff is humble and merit-oriented. * Great engineers. I don't know everybody, because we grew and the number of people is just too high to know all of them, but the ones I work with, in my team and in the other teams, are really excellent. It is not only about "hard-skills". Senior people always help and answer questions whenever you need help. * We have a great product. Engineers pay attention to write good code. Sure, our code-base has bugs or some hacks (who doesn't have them?), but generally we are encouraged to refactor code and improve quality all the time. Recently we've been putting more focus on quality than on new features. If you write throw-away write-only code, this company is *not* for you. * Crunch-time is rare. Managers take care that everybody gets enough rest. We don't work Saturdays and Sundays. During the last year, there was exactly one occurrence, where I worked on a critical bug on weekend - but this was an exception and not a rule. * No scrum cargo-cult. * No task estimation madness, low pressure. * Lightweight procedures. The main process is: Think-design-implement-review-test. Repeat.

Cons

* Work from home requires self-discipline and affects work-life balance negatively. For Europeans the meetings are often in the afternoons or even evenings, in order to be able to meet with guys from the USA. You have to be careful not to work too much the whole day long up to the evening. Also the tasks are sometimes so cool that it is hard to stop thinking about work ;) * The company is still young and things change frequently. * Not all of the code is good and there are some sharp corners in the product - we were working very fast as a startup and we have technical debt to clean up and some areas of the product can be simplified. But the most important part for me is that the technical debt does get cleaned up eventually (unlike in the previous company I worked for, where nobody cared and management thought cleaning up technical debt was just a waste of time).