Pros
1. Food, water, shelter during the weekdays 2. Life lessons on grit and perseverance 3. Easy to tell who your true friends are
Cons
Disclaimer: I’m on my way out of this place soon. I debated for a while whether to post this or not, but after seeing others here with similar experiences, I decided to submit it anyway. Couple years back, Cloudera was on the list of best places to work. Execs regularly chanted “develop and retain your talent” and reflected openly on employee engagement surveys. Then they couldn’t even develop their talent and we thought that was bad. The merger was announced and they couldn’t even retain their talent. Employees recently took an engagement survey and the results disappeared somewhere. Everything is just descending into hell. Prior to the IPO in 2017, management told us that as a public company, they could not be as open with sharing info during all hands. Few anticipated this level of secrecy and dysfunction. I can briefly convince myself to overlook the stock price and short-sighted leadership because everybody at this company is affected and suffering, but I will never accept the treatment that I have gotten at this place post-merger with my new “boss” and all these power-hungry snakes. I worked 55+ hour weeks premerger while underpaid relative to the market because I enjoyed working with some of the other ICs, and my reward is a slimy unqualified new boss who has spent the past few months telling me with a completely straight face how knowledgeable he is compared to me (aka insecure) and attempting to dent my reputation in front of others. This is the kind of culture you want to build here?????!!!! After all I have done for this company, this is the coward’s way to treat an employee. Forget contacting anybody for help — easy to say and impossible when certain individuals in your hierarchy play the political game and are quite cozy with HR. Does anybody seriously trust the group of “leaders” who stood to the side while the fire burned to do anything to alleviate the pain and suffering??? The worst part is that there are even worse cases of “hidden suffering” here. Now I really don’t care for any of these new Cloudera code values. Let’s see: openness, power of we, moving forward, empathy — wait, is it Opposite Day??? Most of the execs are legacy Cloudera but anyone can see the legacy HWX culture just emanating upwards and throughout the whole company. There are people who will recite the cookie-cutter "their culture is just like this" response — completely unacceptable response that you can save for your next company that is actually succeeding in the market. There is a fine line between aggressive and full of jerks. This culture has already entered the latter’s territory. Cloudera is now the quintessential definition of the following phenomena: yes-man heaven, blind leading the blind, power in the hands of the wrong people, toxic environment, and repeated mistakes. Take my skip-level for instance: grossly unqualified for the position, pretends to listen to the team then completely u-turns in front of management and tells them everything is going super well and the team is doing well, meets secretly with HR to influence their opinion of people who are raising concerns, and thinks the team is stupid enough to continue to put up with the BS and show up to work everyday. After one instance of raising concerns, I was told to prioritize better, “control the controllable,” and focus on improving myself. Needless to say, I am done with this place. But now meetings can be rather entertaining to watch if I work from home, because I can keep my camera off and grab popcorn to eat while watching the uninformed opinions bounce off the uninformed people in the room. A bonus is watching the knowledgeable people stay silent and watch in amusement as the idiots continue running their meeting.
