Squandering their first mover advantage - Anonymous Aiven Employee Review

2.0
Aug 24, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Flexible working, good salaries, and some very smart people. A focus on work/life balance and some good benefits. The offices if you're near them are very pleasant and easy to work in. A good culture of calling out hard work in some teams. An off-site which is well managed. Opportunities for progression, especially in engineering.

Cons

There's an episode of the Simpsons where homer walks into a group of engineers and goes "are you working hard?.... Could work any harder?" And the engineers just start pressing buttons more quickly This is how the executive team at aiven see workers. Their logic is that everyone should be a 10x engineer so why hire more? Well a scrappy start up isn't the same as a large global organisation with multi million contracts. There's a huge amount of technical debt that simply cannot be tackled because of massive firefighting, every day. Missold accounts, poor user experiences. The refusal to add capacity means competitors are overtaking aiven rapidly but culturally this problem is only recognised in a few areas. Very good people also leave, they are frustrated by Byzantine hr processes which aim to curtail pay. The cost of replacing these individuals is greater than the cost of a small pay rise. Ultimately sales will continue to stagnate until aiven accepts it cannot be run on a shoestring. Open source is less of a value proposition than it was 5 years ago. If you want large enterprises be mindful of what they really need and don't be thrifty.

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Aiven Response
1y
Thank you for sharing your feedback about your experience at Aiven. We appreciate you taking the time to highlight areas where we can improve. We understand your concerns regarding the workload and expectations. Having a healthy and sustainable work environment is something we strive for, although there's always room for improvement in balancing growth with the well-being of our employees. We're actively reviewing our processes and resource allocation to ensure our teams are well-equipped to handle their responsibilities. We also recognise the challenges posed by technical debt and the need to balance immediate problem-solving with strategic initiatives. We're committed to investing in addressing technical debt and building a scalable infrastructure to support our growth. Your feedback about employee turnover and compensation is valuable. Regarding compensation and talent retention, we are continuously review our offerings to ensure they remain fair and competitive and that we create an environment where top talent can thrive. As an agile technology company, we will continue to refine and adjust our approach to achieving our vision, in order to continue to meet market demands, and we acknowledge that change can be difficult. We value your insights and will use them to guide our continuous improvement efforts. Ed Director, Talent & People Experience

Explore other reviews about Aiven

5.0
Aug 8, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Dynamic sales role! Never a dull moment.

Cons

Very challenging, which forces one to think outside of the box.

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Aiven Response
9mo
Thank you for your positive feedback. We're thrilled to hear that you're enjoying your role here. We hope you continue to enjoy the challenge ahead! Ed Director, Talent & People Experience
2.0
Dec 5, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Decent salary, good international travel opportunities, interesting and kind colleagues

Cons

Executive leadership has no vision or appetite to stick to a plan. Despite hiring many people with the experience and skillset to win, leadership routinely ignores advice from within the house, over-commits to half-baked plans, assigns the wrong people to tasks, and then is unwilling to take accountability for continuously failing to deliver anything new.

10
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