Incompetent management, toxic environment - Anonymous employee DataTorrent Employee Review

1.0
24 Jul 2016
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The company has solid platform offering some good enterprise features to support streaming applications. However, one critical shortcoming of the product is that it is designed for hard-core developers and therefore very hard to use for the non-technical folks in a organization. This has proven to be the showstopper for the market adoption and has been hurting the company's top and bottom line. Free lunch and snacks, flex schedule and other standard startup perks

Cons

This is so far the worst place I have worked at. The leadership team lacks the expertise in every aspect of the management principles and has set some bad examples for the company. Meetings are rarely held on-time; strategies are poorly communicated, changed constantly, and never being carried through execution. The founders have no clear vision on where the company is headed in this emerging and highly competitive market, allowing competitors to crush us and easily gain mindshare. The poor result also triggered quite tension internally, different teams started blaming each other over trivial stuff. Worse yet, not only do the founders have no clue on how to run a business, but they also surround themselves with equally incompetent people who are good at talking their way up to the food chain instead of delivering results, hence driving out many good folks who actually get job done and provide constructive feedback to the leadership team. The company's result speaks for itself: revenue is next to zero since the start of the year; high turnover in all departments; and the number of customers has stagnated since last fall. Advice for the job seekers: please please please do your home work before applying for career opportunity at this company, talk to not just one, but a few folks who used to work there to get a good picture on how it's like working at DataTorrent, see if you can get a consistent answer.

Explore other reviews about DataTorrent

5.0
18 Aug 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The product is extremely good, and it shows in how fast the open source community around it is growing. Overall excellent on work:life balance. Unlimited PTO and flexibility to work remote. In the office, lunches are paid for and snacks are provided. Good benefits package with option for zero-out-of-pocket. Management trusts your expertise in your role, but also wants you to be thorough in data collection/reporting. Learning is shared openly and everyone is eager to help each other and the company grow. Potential for career growth is limited only by your ambition and creativity.

Cons

The product is leading the market by a fair bit, and so the sales cycles are longer and require more education. Marketing team is very focused at bottom-of-funnel and could do more at the top and mid-funnel to support educating and informing prospects. Being a very young company, a lot of processes are still being built out. Things can change rapidly from day to day, sometimes even hour to hour. Definitely requires adaptability and good faith. No 401k but we're told they're working on it.

5
1.0
2 Sept 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Some of the employees are pretty dedicated and talented.

Cons

The biggest con in this company is it's leadership or lack thereof. The CEO is absolutely incompetent and very deceiving. For some strange reason, his way of managing is to deceive, manipulate people and pit one against the other. It's a running joke in the company to guess when he is lying behind his back. He has a knack of always finding a scapegoat to blame his bad decisions on. The CTO has no business experience and there are times where you can find the CEO quarreling with him like children. The CEO likes to claim that it's his decision to step down, but we all know that he was forced down. The challenge is now to find someone who can inherit this mess. Unfortunately, this change can't come soon enough as it may already be too late. Lately the employees have been asked to post positive reviews on Glassdoor as they fear that the negative reviews are impacting recruiting. People looking to join this company should realize that doing so is equivalent to committing career suicide. Unless there is a complete purge of this putrid leadership, the chances of this company's survival is minimal to none. Besides other solutions like Spark Streaming & Flink have become mainstay technologies with a prominent place in reference architectures. The CEO has done a tremendous job running this "company" to the ground.

12
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