Pros
- Some really amazing people work here. Extremely intelligent, kind, diverse, and open-minded folks. - Base compensation is on par with other tech companies of a similar size. - Remote-first, absolutely no chance of an RTO situation that's plaguing many other tech orgs. - Great benefits. Home office stipends, wellness stipends, phone & internet stipends, the works.
Cons
The biggest red flag any candidate should be aware of is the lack of a coherent product strategy. The co-founders built a great open source product, but as others have mentioned, it doesn't seem like leadership has the experience necessary to build a good paid offering. In my year and a half at dbt, I witnessed 3 product investments totally fail and the firing on an extremely experienced ex-Salesforce CPO for "strategic differences." Following the firing, after months and probably lots of money invested into dbt Python models, the project was completely abandoned and the PM fired. The Semantic Layer launch was a failure and hasn't generated any revenue. They doubled down by acquiring Transform, and now I hear there is friction between the Transform and dbt Leadership. Lastly, there was a significant investment in a "runtime" team to optimize dbt Cloud speed (This part is kind of over my head as a non-technical employee). Not even 6 months later, the entire project was scrapped and the PM and EM were fired. Before I was laid off, deal sizes weren't large enough to sustain growth targets even after the board adjusted them down by a lot. This is a horrible signal to the board, and I wouldn't be surprised if the board guts the entire leadership team soon, causing even more instability. On the GTM side, it's much of the same. Smart, hardworking folks running around like a chicken without a head due to a lack of strategy. Marketing and Sales leadership has never managed teams or strategy of this complexity and it shows. Just like in Product, teams are set up for failure and then fired when it finally comes crashing down. Constant reorgs, overinvestment in areas that don't drive growth (don't get me started on Snowflake Summit), and underinvestment in growth areas.