What are meetings like at Datadog?

- great people, strong collaboration within the team, direct Managers genuinely care about the wellbeing of their team - Great office with catered lunches 3 days per week - Party pups once per month where the whole office gets together and either go out for an event or has a themed party in the office, great for team bonding and also meeting people from other departments - great learning opportunities, they will sponsor your certifications - no layoffs during the period a lot of tech companies were downsizing - good benefits, there is health insurance, pension contributions and fitness reimbursement

- in the last 2 years the focus has been solely on KPIs and numbers, so much that VPs are looking each week into the numbers of tickets the Support Engineers are taking, they revised the KPIs for different product areas as they have different complexity but then decided everyone should get 6 tickets per day which would bring some Support Engineers to 170% utilisation per day, people are overworked and a lot of them above the KPIs required for the role but it seems this is the norme now - Return to office has been so strictly imposed in Support without a possibility to be flexible if peoples life circumstances have changed, it will impact your future progression in the company, they say to stay home if you are not feeling great but your RTO attendance will be impacted and in 6 months when you are up for a promotion the only thing they will see is the number and that you didn't meet the requirements - a lot of attrition, you can rarely find people here longer than 2/3 years, even Managers who have been here longer are leaving - our enablement team is so out of touch with the product and what is actually needed to do the job, they think it's possible to ramp up in 3 months by watching videos, we need more live workshops and experienced Support Engineers showing how to troubleshoot issues

things that in the long run you realize are just a smoke screen-free lunches 3 days a week and sweet kitchen,

Where do I even start...If you are serious about working at this company, I implore you to read this entire thing This CS role is account management and customer success combined. You are constantly dealing with client issues which they say the company’s values and want you to respond within 24 hours but then ask why your sales metrics are low when you have no time to prospect. Basically, they are asking you to do two jobs for the low price of 1 and you must work long hours just to keep up. Knowing they are asking a lot out of you; they make it even worse by micromanaging the hell out of you. They say they won’t when you start but as time goes on you ask about it and get hit with “this is what is expected of you in the role.” They don’t take any ownership and deflect to “this is our system” BS. You will spend HOURS repeating work, updating accounts on everything you do throughout the day and filling out what they call deal reviews. Basically, you must show your manager what you’re doing on almost every account, fill out multiple excel sheets of the same product allotment list and its infuriating. The biggest red flag is that their products have a VERY HIGH technical learning curve and there is NO REAL TRAINING aligned for customer success. The training they give you to start is 90% geared towards new sales and is basically a waste of your time. Once you’re in the role your only support is to bother your peers and your designated "buddy" who walks you through different aspects of the job in the beginning but then have their own job to do and eventually drop off. You are stuck having to ask a million questions with no real process for anything as everyone does things differently. The hardest part is their product is so technical that it is hard to understand fully and difficult to pitch. When you have meetings with clients you talk to a lot of engineers and developers so as soon as you bring up a product and get two sentences in you are completely lost. Example-It took 6 months before we got a training session on the main platform and how to walk through a basic demo with a client-6 MONTHS!! That should be something we do in the first week Also, datadog charges their clients 10’s of thousands of dollars for training of their product lol. So very little clients actually pay for that and then it all falls on you to figure it out for them (but you have no clue either because you had no real training so it becomes chaos and very time consuming-something you have very little of to begin with) So many of your clients don’t understand the products they are using, how to properly navigate the basics of the platform or how they are billed. What this translates into is almost every time you try to upsell or expand their account all they care about is optimizing and bringing their price down. They bought the product for $50k two years ago and because they didn’t know how to use the products correctly, they are now renewing for $200k and don't know how it happened. So, hitting your sales growth number is very difficult and half of any success is just luck of a company consolidating. I have communicated with so many people in the customer success department during my time there and there are employees 2-3 years in who are still very lost and rely on luck to hit their sales numbers If you have made it this far into this review, then props to you. You really care about how you are going to be supported in a new role and what I would say to you is RUN. Do not take this job, they will not train you and it’s less than a 50/50 shot that you figure it out or get let go in 4-6 months because you couldn't cut it. My advice to you is to find a more established customer success department that has a real training system and products that aren’t extremely difficult to grasp.