Started great, then steadily declined in its culture - Senior Software Engineer MongoDB Employee Review

3.0
22 Nov 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Smart people, competitive compensation, bi-weekly retrospectives on processes and team work, quarterly onsites, and interesting projects. There are still some great people working here, but there are also those who ruin it for everyone else, as you'll see in the cons section.

Cons

While the company started out mostly great when I joined, many projects were not planned out correctly and resulted in gross underestimation, while churn relieved its original participants from any accountability. This only becomes apparent over time, but by the time one realizes the predicament they are in, they are too heavily invested and overworked to crawl out of it. Its famed culture started to decline soon after the arrival of several top level executives from Amazon, and once tech layoffs became fashionable, management blissfully declared that no layoffs were planned but instead "raised the bar" by vastly reducing the number of overperformers during each review cycle and enforced that 5% must be underperformers. Indeed, the culture continued its rapid descent while the company took on more and more former Amazon executives. To be fair, promotions were rampant and many people who were not ready for their new roles were promoted too quickly to begin with. Perhaps this was seen as a way to combat the rapid rise, but did little to deal with people who were already in those roles; there were plenty of 'leaders' who are in no position to lead others. These people remained in positions of power while themselves underperformed, and are now pressured to deliver or streamline their costs. This resulted in making demands on their teams that started to overstep reasonable expectations, pushing those team members into the "underperform" category and finally managing them out with a performance improvement plan, despite performing well in every other metric, resulting in termination without severance. Culture, innovation, and work life balance now take a backseat at this company, but I suspect this is only the beginning.

Explore other reviews about MongoDB

5.0
8 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The early talent team does a fantastic job supporting interns and making the transition from college to full-time comfortable. Team's truly do care for you

Cons

Felt like there was a lot changes happening at the executive level

2.0
23 Mar 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Most benefits are solid, exception being no matching 401K which is kind of insane for tech. Embraces the use of AI for all employees.

Cons

MongoDB is extremely dysfunctional from a marketing POV. The functional silos built a culture of no collaboration and just checking boxes of doing the same things over and over again. Leadership at the MLT level is out of their depth for what the business needs out of marketing to grow. There is arrogance encouraged by a bully CMO who has her favorites that can be held to different standards than others and it is abundantly clear. That attitude trickles down into all of MLT and never really offer solutions, just criticisms. Pay is lower than other companies for the same role. Lack of clarity of what it takes to get a promotion. Blatant disregard for Employee Engagement surveys that have been on a decline for years that leadership takes no ownership on improving.

3
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