Pros
1. Training (might be a bit less now as they don't want guys leaving to become consultants!) 2. Looks good on your Resume, opens doors to better paying jobs (if you're experienced you can go straight to those jobs however) 3. Free lunches delivered from waiter.com - you don't leave office for $13 ;) 4. Decent wages but good guys earn better elsewhere, which is why they've ended up hiring guys with little or no Hadoop experience now. 5. Still good core engineering on the west cost which are great to work with - smart move would be to poach those developers as the company itself doesn't contain much unique value aside from them - a few of the veterans have moved on already...
Cons
1. Tough market competition, slipping position as Apache Foundation open source catches up thanks to Hortonworks. I was surprised how widespread pro-Hortonworks sentiment was by comparison after I left Cloudera, Cloudera's self serving attitude is driving appetite for Hortonworks. 2. The company attitude has been described as "arrogant" by more than one of my ex-colleagues. 3. Poor hiring - Cloudera are hiring people with no Hadoop experience. Yes you read that right. ZERO HADOOP EXPERIENCE. They don't even get asked Hadoop questions in interview since they have no experience, that's how ridiculous it's become. Lots of ex-Oracle employees in Cloudera now, it's become an old boys club in some parts where friends are hired in through the back door, regardless of them not having any Hadoop or Big Data experience at all. 4. Rank / Titles messed up - newbies have same titles as hardened Hadoop veterans, managers with less experience than their subordinates - you know it's bad when even someone from another department asks you how X got promoted to "manager" with less experience than subordinate Y, must have been drinking the... 5. Kool Aid - "company loyalty" / brand religious culture, partly caused by insecurity in the fast changing marketplace where there's now little market differentiation to warrant such an over-priced (2-3x) semi-proprietary product vs the fully open source HW. Far too much hype. 6. Work life balance - Good luck with that. It's a heavily labor intensive business, one of the reasons Cloudera can't afford all the perks that some other people have mentioned on glassdoor. 7. All Hype - nobody is making money in the big data vendor space even after 5-6 years, nor in any of the related 3rd party products from what I've surveyed, and products are becoming obsoleted year-on-year before they've even been monetized. 8. Complaining that Hortonworks isn't building a sustainable business because they charge less and hoping they fold isn't a great strategy since there is no sign of that happening, if anything they only seem to pick up momentum and improve product in open source under Apache Foundation. What if HW keep going? How will Cloudera manage to compete with virtually the same product but 100% open source and at 1/2 or 1/3 the price? Vendor-lock in with the proprietary Cloudera Manager, Navigator? Most of the experienced users of this space come from open source and don't want proprietary... 9. Lack of Vision and Innovation - they allowed Hortonworks to drive and complete Yarn without interest which has now become the next generation platform - relegating all Hadoop vendors to just commoditized infrastructure, not a premium offering, it's all about Yarn Apps now. Spark also obsoletes Hadoop MapReduce, Databricks invented Spark, so given the 2 most important frameworks in the ecosystem were invented elsewhere it feels like Cloudera has lost it's leadership edge. 10. Fractured culture internally - pro vs anti-Apache Foundation groups, as a result some components not released to Apache, increasingly it feels like Cloudera is not the open source darling it once was, and as it veers away from Apache it loses support. Apache is "just marketing" to Cloudera according to one manager.
