Datadog was a great company once, that's why I worked there for so long. But around April 2022 the Bobs came. Unbelievably I witnessed many things that happened in that movie happen in real life. The first thing they did was 'fix the glitch'. While the market moved to pay my role drastically more than I was getting, instead of correcting this they changed the name of the role to align with that of first level support. Then just expected things to sort themselves out -- and they did. Most people left and got double what they were getting at Datadog. With new upper management just essentially halving everyone's pay, expecting us to do 10x more work than what was possible, and not listening to anything we say -- I decided to be cautious. Cautious enough to do nothing (of value) at work for 3 months. Expecting to be fired I was scheduled a meeting with one of the upper management -- who told me I was doing a great job, gave me a promotion, and a pay raise. I didn't understand it at first, but then we also changed the way we handled corporate travel. In the good old days if you had worked hard and achieved - learnt things that no one else in the company knew - you were rewarded by being sent around the world to train the other teams. But under new managment instead we would send all of the students to the teacher at great expense. For one training session, almost the entire attendee list had already done that same training over a year ago. I think they were buying people off. Some general things that I witnessed from upper management: - Constantly talking about themselves. - Interrupting one on one meetings by just walking in and putting their hand in the face of the person they weren't talking to. - Traveling around the world to visit the global offices but barely visiting the offices. I only put the things I personally witnessed here as some of the rumours were so wild as to be unbelievable if you had not met the people they were about in person. And by the Gods if you want to keep your job. If they add you on LinkedIn accept their request. This, unfortunately, was my fatal mistake. Datadog was a workplace that was once built on love, trust, and communication, but that has now been replaced with gaslighting, exploitation, and emotional manipulation. If you choose to work here, enjoy the free travel!
