Pros
Hazelcast once had a strong community of users and a team of people who cared for the company / product. It was fun to work with people who cared and engage with a community that cared. Hazelcast has a really strong and loyal customer base - due to previous great things the company has done in the community and across industry.
Cons
Hazelcast could have been great or at least, had the chance of being great. Belief is an amazing motivator - but for a number of reasons which I'll try to list them in order of priority, it's managed to choose failure over success. 1/ Trust From outright lies, that were essentially stated one month and then the opposite done the following month, to toxic behaviour of attacking people behind their back. That pretty much sums up the executive leadership team and many "senior" people at the firm. In 2+ years, there have been 2 or 3 CEOs (depending on if you count co-CEO as 2 or 1!), 2x CMOs, 1x CPO, 1x CTO, 2x CFOs, 2x CROs and counting... Hard to build trust when the leadership doesn't trust itself or the people who work at the firm. People are bounced from manager to manager, without any care or interest, if they are even noticed at all and leaders who do not display role modelling behaviour or work cohesively, corrupt the culture they verbally promote. 2/ Lack of strategy & planning The poor management decisions that began in 2020 and continued unabated since, have destroyed any culture the company had or tried to put in place. Hard to know if that was the cause or a symptom of the churn in leadership, but the inability for any senior person at the firm to be able to articulate a concrete strategy that sticks for more than 3 months, or indeed build a plan of how to achieve success (and indeed, what success looks like), tells it's own story. Seemingly, "senior people" were in the jobs for the first time of their career and it shows, with some not able to manage people, process and projects. It's difficult to ascertain the value provided by many of the individuals in a senior post for the last 5 years. 3/ Brain drain & lack of ability The number of people who know what the product is or what it can do, and the number of people who know what the target user base is trying to achieve - is very few. Anyone with a passion for the company / technology has left and most of engineering has been exited in the last 12+ months due to a disastrous people strategy overseen by the executive leadership team. 4/ Lack of product knowledge/care The company is over 100 people large, yet having an in-depth conversation of the product can ONLY be done by engineering. The downside is that the engineering team isn't close to the target user. The teams close to the target user, don't know or understand their business needs or fail to conduct discovery. The moment a difficult pre or post sale issue arises, it is immediately escalated to engineering. Sometimes it's not even difficult, just needs someone to run the software - which is beyond many of the people at the firm. Engineering went from being the engine of a great product company to the crutch that every part of the business now leans on. There are even 'technical' people who did not have access to the source code or indeed, ever contribute to it or the documentation. Suggesting that they hardly (if ever) ran the software or conducted any self discovery. 5/ Incapable of GTM Hazelcast is the only company I've ever worked at, where internally the company tries to sabotage itself at every possible opportunity. See above in terms of senior leadership churn. Hazelcast has shown it is incapable of actually launching software successfully, which as a software company is like failing at the first step. A bad launch that is learnt from, is actually valuable. But no launch, ever, is worthless. 6/ Aging technology The codebase is bloated from bad historical decisions and there is no one at the company left to drive it. The problem domain remains interesting, but in 2025 there are more competitors than there were in 2012 when Hazelcast started. As such, newer organisations provide modern tech stack AND technical challenge. As innovation has ground to a halt (on purpose due to the latest strategy), and given the brain drain - interesting and capable engineers are fewer and far between than they once were. 7/ Apathy Everyone has an opinion - but very few actually deliver anything of value. The ones that did - have left the firm. With no innovation and most sitting on their hands waiting to be paid out, the apathy is telling. The community is not even engaged with, nor is there any community anymore. Open Source is a label for lip service, not a core belief anymore.
