Clearwater Analytics (CWAN) reviews

It really saddens me to look at the Clearwater that exists today and see how far it has fallen. I was once so proud to work there and so grateful every day to have found such an amazing place to work. However I no longer recognize Clearwater and mourn the loss of what once was. There used to be a flat hierarchy where upper management knew me and I felt they respected me as an employee. I used to feel empowered to do my job and have input on what would make the overall product better. Now there is layer upon layer of bureaucracy where the low level employees have no input and are often found caught between feuding at the top. There were many times I was told one thing by one level of management, but the opposite thing by the next level up. One manager telling you to work on this specific thing and then when you go talk to the other teams needed to make it happen they have been told not to help you. The only thing that matters now is profit and gross margin. The last few years development has been screaming that we need a significant rearchitecture of how we do things and it seemed like goals were made to address ticking tech debt time bombs. Unfortunately those goals were dropped. Things like moving away from our giant monolithic database were pushed off by leadership because that doesn't bring in new money and that is all the private equity holders of the company care about. The company is now paying the price as system stability issues are rampant. Developers are no longer trusted to deploy and must sit through hours of weekly meetings in order to have even a chance to deploy things. It's not uncommon for working and valid changes to take 3 or 4 months to get actually get released because the system is so unstable nothing is allowed out. Work life balance which was once the greatest benefit at Clearwater is no more. Gone are the days of "it's a marathon not a sprint". The system constantly breaks and the greatest load is during night time hours. Employees are up at all times of the night trying to prod data through the system. The employees that receive the greatest amount of recognition now are the ones who spend all night babysitting the aged system like tending to a decrepit grandparent on life support. All upper management ever talks about is how much we are growing and how much money the company is making. The new CTO loves to brag about how many billions the company is worth, but regular rank and file employees that built this company have zero equity and see nothing from record breaking profits every fiscal year. Receiving equity is continually brought up in company meetings by employees and is consistently dodged and avoided. It is demoralizing to realize you are just a cog to be chewed up and spit out to make boat loads of money for an elite few in the company. Morale has never been lower and management does not care. They will create focus group meetings where employees can bring up concerns. No changes ever come from these meetings and employees are just given the some rote answers to legitimate concerns. Being an employee at Clearwater was like being in an abusive relationship where I was constantly feeling like I was being gas lighted to think that there was nothing wrong despite constantly bringing up complaints with management. Here are actual real life examples of questions I asked in public gatherings and the answers I received. Q: "What are you going to do about so many of my colleagues leaving?" A: "Attrition is actually down." Q: "I'm really concerned about morale and have never seen it so low among my coworkers in the years I've worked at Clearwater." A: "Employee satisfaction is high" Q: "I don't feel like I'm getting opportunities to work on valuable projects that make a difference." A: "The majority of teams are doing valuable work." Q: "There are many people who feel our cloud migration plan deadline is unrealistic." A: "Doesn't matter. I'm the CTO and picked a date and it will happen." When I turned in my resignation I was asked why and mentioned the lack of opportunity to do valuable work and that management had told us explicitly to wait on doing things like moving to the cloud or implementing needed new functionality. I was then scolded for not taking charge and just ignoring the same manager and not just doing those things despite management explicitly telling me not to. It honestly felt like leaving an abusive relationship by the end of my tenure at Clearwater which is truly shocking considering how respected I felt just a few years ago. Recently the entire QA department was let go. It was revealed to a group of us by a C-level executive that the entire process of laying off the entire department was botched. There were plans to make a plan to transition away from having QA's on development teams, but a manager leaked early to a QA that the entire department was to be laid off. This forced management to rapidly ramp up the transition plan and there wasn't enough time to properly prepare for letting an entire department that was so integral to the development process go. It has been a mess ever since and the rationale for letting them go was never truly explained. The developers in the Boise office are seen as inferior and not trusted by the brain trust that has formed in Seattle. The new CTO would love to just close the Boise office and move it all to Seattle. All new leadership openings in dev are never offered internally and only hired externally from Seattle. It's very common for teams to be missing team or division leads because they'd rather have nothing than an internal hire from Boise. Clearwater had made so much progress on this front and had developed a good pattern of listing every team lead position opening and allowing internal interviews from many candidates. When my team lead left there was no advertising of the position internally and it was only advertised to external hires in Seattle. There was an all hands meeting where a large list of promotions within the company were shown. Not a single developer was on the list. I asked the question in the meeting why there weren't any developer promotions on the slides and was given the run around. There is a mass exodus of senior developer talent leaving the company and I worry about my colleagues that have been left behind. Those who are talented are leaving in droves and the ones that aren't the cream of the crop are left behind which will make the issues only worse. It became a running joke on our team towards the end on who would be the developer that week to leave the company. Without fail we'd get a company wide email on another developer leaving and lament the loss of such a great talent. If you are a developer and interested in Clearwater please run as far away as you can. There are so many wonderful opportunities in the Treasure Valley. All my former colleagues that left are so much happier. I feel like a giant weight has been lifted off my shoulders now that I've left.

Welson, Carson, Anderson, and Stowe purchased a majority share in Clearwater during 2016, and really started to push for an IPO in mid-2018. In tandem came a complete swap of company leadership. The employee experience has steadily degraded ever since. In an effort to get to the aforementioned IPO, Clearwater became overly bureaucratic. Any type of insight employees may have over the products they own or work with will be stymied because your team and division leads don’t have any actual power to direct the companies efforts. In that sense, the leadership is very disconnected from those in the trenches. Clearwater is winning sales and new clients across the globe, but they haven't paired that sales success with well-executed initiatives to increase head count and scale their platform. The operational burden on the entirety of the organization for the past two to three years has pushed many employees to the brink and it doesn't leave time for them to be innovative, rested, healthy employees; rather, they're always fighting the latest fire or struggling to get the latest promised deliverable out the door. Employees are constantly requesting additional headcount to combat this, but the employee attrition rate makes it near impossible. For example, there was a big push to add a headcount of ~120 employees to their implementations division over six months (internally called Global Delivery), and the attrition within that time frame negated the effort, leaving the day to day unchanged for just about everyone. No relief, no improvements. The past three years in Boise has been a time of unprecedented rises in living costs and the company’s HR (who keeps an iron fist around compensation) absolutely refused to respond at all. The salary of an entry level software engineer without another job offer’s leverage remains the same as it was in 2017 before the rise. It’s apparent to everyone that the biggest way to stop employee dissatisfaction is to raise salaries, but leadership refuses to confront this reality: Instead, they ask the employees to be more passionate about the work and promise them career development in return. In contrast, career development at Clearwater, vertically or horizontally, is abysmally slow and nowhere near fast enough for how fast people can personally develop their skills and ability. It's quietly acknowledged in one-on-one meetings between managers and employees that the best way to get the compensation you deserve is to jump ship and come back some time later, if at all. Execs seem to think that giving employees equity is adequate to stop the tide of compensation dissatisfaction, but when your bimonthly paycheck isn’t putting enough dollars in your pocket to provide a reasonable standard of living, no amount of equity can fix it. From a development perspective, the company needs more SREs, and this is a serious point of bottleneck for their development efforts. Clearwater struggles to get away from the prototypical Java+Maven+Apache stack because SREs have no time to prioritize making development feasible and comfortable in other languages such as Python, Javascript, or Go. If your team decides it wants to use a different technology, you'll be left to invent the wheel. I have heard from several managers in development that the reason they struggle to hire is because HR refuses to compete with the new normal of remote salaries and seems to think they should get pre-2018 Boise prices for development talent. The consequence is that there is very little reason for potential hires to come to Clearwater, and they don't. The attempts to establish culture at Clearwater have been detestable. Their best effort was an email campaign by top execs where each pontificated on a quality they wanted the company to have. Many have jokingly referred to it as "propaganda" even in front of their managers and their managers' managers without repercussion because everyone that wasn't an exec felt that it was a fitting term. The potential for a great work culture is there, but until they can reduce the actual employee load and get leadership that knows how to create it, the environment at Clearwater will feel sterile and void of it. There is the makings of a really great company within Clearwater, but regardless, the employee experience has suffered tremendously in the past three years due to disconnected and incapable leadership. The success of its product masks that fact to the board and stakeholders, so I'd steer clear until they clean house, whenever that may be.