Where to start? Splunk has had culture problems for a while, but when we were smaller, they were easier to ignore. And they weren't that bad compared to how bad they are now.
Lately, there's been this obsession with growth at all costs. The board and C-level execs have dollar signs in their eyes and they ignore everything that's getting worse as long as revenue continues to go up.
Like hiring employees just so we can grow. No one is asking whether or not the increased head count improves the quality of the company or the quality of the product itself. The message seems to be "Just hire some more friends from AOL / Yahoo and double up on hiring middle management types from outside."
The skill of the new hires isn't the worst in the world, but it's clear that we're hiring bodies to fill chairs and glossing over their lack of skill and ability. In some cases, we've hired unqualified friends of upper level execs that only managed to embroil the company in lawsuits rather than bring anything useful to the table.
Rather than promoting from within, we've just been hiring less than competent middle management and then there's utter shock and surprise when they're bad at their job and cause skilled employees to leave.
At some point in the last year or so, financial consultants were hired or consulted, because we've stopped handing out RSUs as freely as we did before - new hires aren't getting stock options nearly as nice as they used to and no one is telling them that.
It's understandable - the cost of employee RSUs has been one of the primary points of contention in the past when Splunk was looking to get acquired. But if you're looking to hire on now, just be warned, the stock options aren't as good as you might have heard previously.
We've also started using stack ranking, which is one of the worst management techniques out there, mostly to cut down on how much we bonus employees. I'm sure the nice quarterly bonuses were one of the first things some financial consultant told the board we needed to cut down on. No one in management has been open or frank about this of course.
So now it's turned into an endless cycle of blame, where employees are pitted against each other and the backstabbing has grown exponentially. Mistakes are glossed over and blamed on others, shoddy work is entirely acceptable as long as you can get management to believe what their employees are telling them. There's no longer a feeling of trust between employees, and at the rate it's going at, we'll have our own corporate version of Lord of the Flies before long.
Oh, and HR is getting people to spam Glassdoor with positive reviews, so that's nice.
And last and worst, don't trust HR if you've been the victim of sexual harassment. I've seen multiple cases where the victims were stabbed in the back by HR and the harassers were protected in the last year and a half or so. I'm not sure if it was this bad previously and it was covered up, or if it's just gotten really bad lately. This most of all has damaged my faith in Splunk.
I thought we were better than this. I'm sure the HR bots will try their best to discredit this, deny it, or try and change the narrative.
