Rackspace Reviews

Former Employee – worked at Rackspace full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Loved my co-workers. Liked the old culture better.

Cons – Hated the politics and good ol boys club. Buddies got promoted based on being buddies not by their abilities or competence. Never ending restructuring of the sales org, increasing quotas, less leads, fewer accounts Sales leadership incompetence.

Advice to Senior Management – To the C levels: Take a close look at your VP and Mid Level management staff and ask yourself are they the right players and how did they get into those positions? Are they bringing game changing leadership and ideas or merely going through the motions. Scrutinize the Q12 management surveys.
Do not accept mediocrity.

VP's and Mid Level managers: Pay attention to your MVP's. Respond to your Q12's with positive change. Cultivate the best from your teams.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Rackspace full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Excellent values, a great culture, and an awesome leadership team all demonstrate that Rackspace cares about its employees and its customers. The company promotes ownership from within the company by empowering its Rackers to do the right thing for our customers, and by offering equity grants/options/discounts as a reward for performance.

Cons – Sometimes our senior leadership sends conflicting priorities based on their own incentives, due mostly to a lack of coordination between them. Our "time off" policy has improved in recent years, but is still sub-par. Several teams have a distinct lack of accountability toward completing projects other teams rely on. Finally, there is the occasional bad manager who really forgets to respect our culture. These are all relatively rare occurrences, however.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Rackspace full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Culture, opportunity for advancement, company positioned for great success.

Cons – Compensation & benefits lag behind competitors.

Advice to Senior Management – Correct compensation

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Rackspace full-time for more than a year

Pros – Culture, freedom to explore technically

Cons – Not much -- I am very happy here having worked at many, many places

Advice to Senior Management – I like what they are doing

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Rackspace full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Great culture, great workplace environment. By its nature, Rackspace is always forward thinking when it comes to technology, so it's easy to keep bleeding edge, and strive to be ahead of the game.

Cons – My least favorite thing would have to be office location. Rackspace looks for the least expensive office space, which isn't always attractive to candidates.

Advice to Senior Management – Make dedicated investments in real estate, looking at the attractiveness to potential employees, and listen to your employes plurality of wants when it comes to location.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Rackspace full-time for more than 8 years

Pros – Some of the senior leadership still cares about the culture and the employees.

Cons – What the senior leadership feels doesn't translate down to the VP level and below, most of which haven't been here long and do not know the old culture. Most of the long term Rackers that I know are leaving now for greener pastures.

Advice to Senior Management – They need to start caring about the employees and the culture. If the employees are happy, then they'll be more apt to make the customers happy and it'll be better for the bottom line.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Rackspace full-time for less than a year

Pros – Hands down, Rackspace is the best company I have ever worked for. There is very little that I can say that is bad about the company. They provide outstanding benefits, great opportunities for growth and both personal and career development, and management there genuinely cares about the employees. I can also honestly say that I made more friends in the time I worked there than at all other jobs combined.

Cons – The only downside I can say about them is that the communication to the overnight teams is lacking.

Advice to Senior Management – Overnight teams get killed sometimes due to a lack of communication from the day shift teams, and by being expected to provide support on some one-off customer setups that don't have enough documentation.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Rackspace full-time for more than a year

Pros – The Rackspace "story" and image is very special and attracts newly hired "Rackers" away from their existing jobs like ants to candy. At first the grass is so much greener it seems too good to be true.

The core values are well structured and drive new employee behaviors. If you are hired by Rackspace you are made to feel unique and special during your first 30 days of employment. During Rookie Orientation they use a statistic that, "It is harder to get into Rackspace than it is to get into Harvard University" based on the percentages.

Cons – While it might be harder to get into Rackspace than Harvard, its a safe bet that the average time spent on campus pursuing an undergraduate degree at Harvard is about two times as long as the average Racker career! I challenge anyone at Rackspace HR to dispute that claim with hard data.

The Core values are lived more so by new employees than existing employees. This is one of the most fundamental disconnects of the Rackspace reality. Once new Rackers begin their journey, they quickly become distracted by heavy workloads and do not think much about their attitudes, let alone whether they are in conflict with what they are told to be the core values of the company. They witness behaviors all around them that are in conflict and over time will slowly begin to see the real values of the company.

At the end of the day, as a 14 year old company it really is a very unprofessional group of young people that thrive on a gossip culture with heavy emphasis on perception and not performance. The HR team is overrun with a school yard mentality where lack of privacy is accepted and everyone knows all the sorted laundry of everyone else.

The current compensation levels are 15-25% below their industry competitors. Typically, management avoids annual merit increases at all costs and instead "awards" additional stock options to its very noisiest Rackers. (These options take 4 years to vest and truly serve no purpose other than to quiet the disharmony.)

At the HQ in San Antonio, Texas the cost-of-living excuse is at the ready to defend its practice of paying below scale. Making money at Rackspace means you are earning it through the stock. Most Rackers will agree that they each took their low-paying position based on the promise of future earnings which seem to move further into the future with each passing week of employment.

Rackers are constantly focused on the "cool & we're better than the rest vibe" of their work place and not on their individual circumstances which include: poor internal systems, high-turnover, low pay, long hours, poor benefits, and constant fear of replacement.

Advice to Senior Management – To the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) - Pay more attention to the mid-level leadership. The title of Vice President is significant and shouldn't be endowed on those that are just working to be in the right place at the right time. Experienced leaders will take you from good to great. Don't allow inexperienced leaders to use Rackspace as a learning ground to experiment with quick/shallow decisions. These people are now in charge of your reputation in the market and truly serve as your face to the Racker.

Treat new hosting contracts as if your personal wealth depends on profitability and not on the current stock price. Your sales teams are growing top-line at the expense of your future profit margin. Sooner or later, that gig won't be sustainable. Many customers are now conditioned to wait until the end of the month to purchase or negotiate their contracts because they realize that Rackspace is frequently employing a used car lot approach (slashing prices) to sales in order to accomplish sales goals at month's end.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Rackspace full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Plenty of development and training

Cons – None at the moment. The best place for a tech to be.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Rackspace full-time

Pros – Rackspace practices what they preach, which is "Fanatical service in everything we do". They not only provide exceptional service to their customers, but to the community as well. Compared to my previous employments, nothing comes close to the experience I have received here at Rackspace.

Cons – Lack of Communication with Upper Management.

Advice to Senior Management – If possible, schedule more meetings with the individuals.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company