Cloudera reviews

Merger is being run by consultants and the higher ups that are funding them - like a horror story with no ending. Decisionmaking for the merger makes the process of electing a new Pope seem transparent. By the time the work is actually given to the lower ranks, it is too late to raise any concerns or warnings about the decisions that management has made and things that management failed to consider - management knows everything. As for the work itself, full speed ahead, no pausing for a break. If you’re involved in the merger integration and not at least a sr manager, don’t bother bringing your ideas to the table. Don’t even bother bringing your brain to meetings unless you’re a parrot. Preferred option is to let the leaders shake up the money tree in the name of the merger and hire consultants to repeat the exact same things people have already told them (albeit packaged more nicely in a fancy ppt, a nice suit plus a bow on top) and hold long meetings with all the managers and their extended families. See the wiki for a chart demonstrating the positive correlation between consultant pay rate and the value of their opinions. Cloudera cares so much about consultant career growth that the entry level ones had to start their career paths creating those merger-related posters plastered around the office. The worst leaders simply send their consultant brigades around the office to do their dirty work while they go and seek shelter in anticipation of the ensuing revolt over their shoddy merger decisions. If the company bleeds to death, thank the big 4 for their help. Bogus titles & roles have been concocted for the favorites & old guard just to keep them employed, even when they add no value and should have been sent packing after merger. These are the ones where you need to take 3 deep breaths to have enough air to do an introduction complete with name, title and tenure. The more corrupt you are, the more resources you get. If Cloudera is Titanic 2.0, HR is the group tasked with locking the gates so the passengers can’t escape. They tell people that the ship isn’t actually sinking because they anticipated approx 3 cups of water entering the ship, and our perception of the situation is incorrect. The sun will come up tomorrow and it’ll be back to business as usual…except…people stop believing this stuff after a while. While this all unfolds, HR colludes with the special inner circle to promote condescending managers and give more headcount so the shady hiring managers who have driven away their best performers can bring on more cronies to weigh down the ship. Hope they all enjoy their fine wine and cigars at the bottom of the sea once the smart ones have escaped on life rafts and the ship sinks. One might ask, why not raise concerns to HR? It’s not worth it. For an org more concerned about correcting the perception of employees than about fixing actual issues, our issues just get in the way of more important things like infusing survey results with a sugary concoction before they’re presented to the masses. For Christmas, Santa needs to ram a giant mirror down the chimney that they can use to do some reflection on what their lack of action is(n’t) accomplishing. That’s the only way they’ll see that creating an actual work culture people want to be a part of doesn’t start with things like personality tests and feedback training. And instead of outsourcing learning to Lynda, they should have started their work by attending every new hire onboarding session and having a real plan the first day the merger closed.

Cons will be the focus of this review. Cloudera is at a critical juncture. The following is written out of sincere hope that Cloudera can improve. Potential new Clouderans - you have an opportunity to contribute to the solution; don't add to the problem. (1) Problematic engineering middle management. There are a few poisonous apples who are dragging down their teams and the company culture. Good managers are not being praised and rewarded/promoted. Well-meaning mediocre managers are not getting opportunities to train/improve. Manager hiring is starting to slide - poisonous apples and mediocre managers start to bring in people that lead to nepotism and empire-building. Leadership team have to spend too much energy playing adjudicator and diplomat regarding middle-management petty fights or rank-and-file pointing out dubious decisions. (2) Diluted Cloudera culture. Cloudera had a unique culture that was once the envy of other companies. It was respectful and truly open, where good ideas can get embraced regardless of origin and rank. Several things diluted the culture. (2.1) Open discussion somehow evolved into grandstanding. When that was rightly discouraged, there was collateral chilling effect on positive discussion. (2.2) Long-tenured employees emphasizing their experience lead to perceptions of diva-like behavior, however unintentionally. This compounds the chilling effect on open discussion. It also encourages problematic middle management to hide behind seasoned employees while eschewing hard-calls and accountability. (2.3) Parts of management becoming infatuated with and trying to copy cultures at other companies, without critically assessing Cloudera's unique strengths and other cultures well-known weaknesses. This is disheartening to the rank-and-file because their peers outside of Cloudera are already panning the cultures that the management tries to copy. (2.4) Personal heroism and long hours glorified. This was not a problem during the necessarily chaotic startup phase. It has become a problem because heroism masks the need to address structural deficiencies - heroism should be rare and exceptional not frequent and expected. Engineering morale and talent retention both suffered. There is a cultural drag as the business aims for efficiency and predictability in preparation for IPO. (3) Open source becoming a burden. This topic receives little visible discussion given Cloudera's sincere, thoughtful, and long-standing commitment to open source. There are a number of issues beyond the common open source detractor material in the trade press. (3.1) Misalignment between the open source community and Cloudera's business. Work that will earn committer status is not necessarily work that is highest priority for Cloudera. If engineering career development within Cloudera is solely tied to committer status, and people without that status are considered second-class citizens, it introduces considerable incentive and misalignment issues. (3.2) Engineering overhead and quality. This is an issue already well-felt by customers and well-appreciated by the leadership team. Cloudera's priority should be to deliver a polished product that customers love. A path to committer status is to deliver a major new feature. Polishing the product involves controlling the product surface area, but building new features will expand it. Over time, the open source bias in favor of new features accumulates into huge engineering overheads - merging changes made outside of Cloudera, making different components mutually compatible, bringing external code to high quality. Cloudera engineering should be Cloudera first. There is inherent misalignment if open source committer status is the sole measure of contribution and respect. (3.3) Inherent shortcomings in integration, usability, time to value. Big data use cases are expanding and diversifying. A rational approach is to solve new problems with existing systems, and when necessary, extend or re-architect on some fixed foundation. Open source incentives lead to an arguably irrational outcome: Whenever opportunity arises, develop an entirely new system, even if existing systems can sufficiently though imperfectly solve the problem. Do so because a new system leads to new project PMC and committer rosters, and hence additional opportunities for self advancement. This outcome creates a huge and unnecessary burden for both Cloudera and its customers. Cloudera has to spend an extraordinary amount of effort juggling an out-of-hand product suite (~15 major CDH components and counting, each component with irrationally growing product surface area). Customers spend an extraordinary amount of effort learning the product and getting it to work. The product should be as close to "turn-key" as possible. Customers' efforts should focus on the data analysis itself, and the data tools should become invisible. To paraphrase a Cloudera co-founder - the best minds of my generation are spending time assembling glorified calculators; that sucks. (4) Talent drain, the bad kind. Rank-and-file Clouderans are absolutely amazing. They have moved mountains under extraordinary circumstances to get Cloudera to where it is today. It's one thing if talent leaves positively to forge their own path and burnish Cloudera's external credentials. It's another if talent leaves because of mind-numbing inflexibility in career development or compensation. It's even worse if talent leaves in groups to avoid poisonous apples in middle-management. Cloudera's big data leader position means that no matter where departing talent lands, it lands on potential competitors.