Great technologies but toxic culture - Senior Software Engineer Instaclustr Employee Review

2.0
Nov 27, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Great opportunity to work with a lot of state of the art technologies. - Good place to learn from many great people. Very good for graduates and junior software engineers. - Many social gatherings arranged and many freebies (clothing, jackets, caps, mugs, etc.). Provides standing desks. MacBook Pro given as working device. - High salary paid and flexibility given at the top level.

Cons

The culture is very toxic. - Most of the people use bad and abusive words and they think this is a cool and smart way to talk. Some of the team leads loves to humiliate staff in front of other people. - They use half yearly review process to find all sort of fault of the junior staff. Very hard to get a promotion, bonus or pay rise for junior or mid level staff. Team leads note every personal and professional mistake you have ever made at office and discuss then in front of all the senior staff. Team leads and higher management staffs are very selfish and use every opportunity to take credit of junior staff's work. - Onboarding is a very hectic process, typically takes about 7 days. The system is over-complicated. After few days, you'll start to have nightmare about the complications in your sleep. - The system is so much tangled that, to change/work on anything you need to talk to at least 3/4 teams to even start. Lots of documentation need to be prepared to even work on a simple bug fix. Publishing to production is also hectic process - typically takes 1-2 days of effort for each task. - The expectation is always one level high. They expect software engineer to perform as senior software engineer and senior software engineer to work as team lead. If you don't understand anything, be prepared to get blamed. If you want to talk to some senior staff, they are always busy. - In case of any problem if you want to talk to higher management, they are ready to blame and humiliate more. VP Software is a completely disgraceful person who is happy to compare a new comer's performance and social behaviour with an Aussie born senior staff who is working there for 6 years. - HR is a joke in resolving issues. Never really a help to a struggling staff and don't have much power to take any effective actions. - You might have to work at overnight shift in a DevOps rotation or support staff rotation.

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Instaclustr Response
4y
Thank you for taking the time to give your feedback. It is extremely disappointing to hear of your experience as it is not inline with the values we live and breathe at Instaclustr, nor of the culture we have worked hard to develop. We are very proud of the exceptional work our engineering team do, and the high standards they hold each other to. I`d like to better understand your particular experience, please feel free to reach out to me directly @ careen.redman-matthews@instaclustr.com for a confidential conversation.

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Pros

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Cons

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4.0
Feb 18, 2019
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Pros

-Great team: enjoy working with my team and cross functionally. Feels like a family, people care about you. People have been at the company for years, that says something. -Industry: hot industry that is continually growing, only meaning more potential for Instaclustr -Opportunity to grow: Company promotes from within, career development available -Culture: Great culture to be a part of. We originated in Australia so the combination of US and AUS culture is great

Cons

-Growing Pains: with any company that is growing out of the start-up phase into a bigger company experiences growing pains just need to make sure to adjust properly. -Flat Org Structure: leadership and management is heavily involved in day to day. Can sometimes take awhile for decisions to be made or approvals

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