Zscaler Reviews

hope to have local office soon

Customer support is terrible, especially during the initial deployment phase, and returns are through the roof high. When you close a sale, you then have to hand hold the customer and support through the entire deployment process to keep things in line, and then escalate, escalate, and escalate some more when things get out of hand, which happens on almost every deal (not exaggerating). Many (though far from all) of our deployment technicians are technically capable, but are very difficult to understand, have terrible communication & customer support skills, take forever to respond to inquiries, etc. I’ve had multiple customers commenting on their deployment experience saying things like “the entire thing has been a sad comedy of errors” and “it’s getting silly, to put it nicely”. The return rate is the highest I’ve ever seen at a company. After you close a sale you’re then sitting on pins and needles hoping it doesn’t come back. This isn’t so much a knock on our deployment team as it is a commentary on the refusal of leadership (specifically Jay) to adequately staff and train the reps. Multiple requests have been made that would help resolve this issue which Jay has shot down. As if the massive returns were not enough, even if everything we sold stayed sold, the team would still be well below 50% of their number due to a combination of a refusal to invest in marketing and an insistence on setting wildly outlandish quotas. Executive leadership expressed to Jay, with data supporting their case, what quotas should set at. Jay stubbornly refused and insisted on quotas that were more than double what was proposed. On a team of more than a dozen tenured seasoned sales professionals, not one made it even halfway to the number this past fiscal year. (Again, not exaggerating.) These returns have had a very negative impact on our relationship with channel partners. Word has gotten around at CDW & SHI not to waste time selling Zscaler as there’s a good chance it’ll be returned and you’ll have a customer satisfaction issue on your hands. There are some things going on at a high level to grow these partnerships, but at the ground level where the rubber hits the road, it’s ugly. Another true story regarding returns: It has happened more than once where a rep would close a deal, then leave Zscaler or move to another role, and then when the deal got returned, the rep that was then covering the territory when the return came took a hit. They never got paid for the initial sale, yet got dinged when the return came. That is not right, yet it has happened more than once. Add this to the list of other shady & unethical things others have reported in their reviews. If you happen to work in sales for Zscaler, be very sure to keep track of what you earn and triple check your paychecks. More than once a reps commission check was wrong. We would have to call out the error, fight to get it corrected, then they acted like everything was fine all along. One shining light in all the deployment issues was the director of deployment, who was phenomenal to work with and did the best he could with what little funding and resources he was allotted. He recently left the company, and I can’t say I blame him. At least when things went south with a deployment, which they often did, we could count on him. Not any more. He’s far from the first director/executive to leave. The turnover rate at the executive level is unbelievably high. The CFO that was supposed to help the company go public recently left. Several area directors have left. There’s been a high turnover rate with SE managers, CMOs, VP of sales, VP of sales ops, etc. So many executives leaving is clearly a telling sign. Why are they leaving? The word from many of them has been that Jay is an extremely difficult CEO to work for. He micromanages everything, sets ridiculous expectations, does not empower you to do what you need to do to be successful and meet said expectations, and is stubborn and arrogant beyond belief. It’s funny - the “Z” in “Zscaler” stands for “Zenith”. We’re the “zenith of scalability” and when it comes to web security, we offer a level of scalability that others don’t and can’t. It’s amazing how Jay can understand the importance of scalability in that sense and yet not understand how his micromanagement style is preventing his company from scaling the way it should. This mass exodus of executive leadership is not a new thing. Though I believe the recent/current round is likely the worst the company has seen, it has been the modus operandi to have a major shake-up every couple years. As some have put it “At Zscaler I’m never at a startup - I’m always at a re-startup.” Jay burns through one round of leaders and then rather than learn anything just replaces them with another set until he burns through them the same way. I’ve noticed a trend here on Glassdoor where after an honest detailed negative review is given, a very generic positive review quickly follows. It seems that something dishonest is going on here to prevent future candidates from seeing the truth about the organization they are considering joining. For example, sort the reviews by date and notice how two detailed reviews titled “"This a promising company with significant problems on multiple levels" and “"Difficult place to work" were quickly followed by the very generic "Proud to Be at Zscaler" and "Happy at Zscaler". If that’s not enough, notice the reviews on December 14, 2016. Roughly a dozen five-star reviews on the same day?!?!? Clearly dishonestly and unethically gaming the system, and reported to Glassdoor for such. As an interesting aside, whoever it was on the Austin team that wrote “"Proud to Be at Zscaler" is either no longer around or on their way out as they are shutting the Austin office down per Jay’s refusal to invest in mid-market. The aforementioned former CFO told him that he wants this thing to take off and go public, he has got to invest in mid-market. The former CTO he hired from GE said on a webcast in front of the whole company that mid-market was the biggest area of opportunity for growth. Many other leaders in the organization, and throughout the industry, have stated the same thing. Their response? Refuse to invest in mid-market and kick that team to the curb. If you click on “rating trends” above, you’ll notice things peaked around May/June of 2015 and have been on a steady decline ever since. This can be attributed to several things, but here’s what I see as driving the rating trends: Leading up to and including the May/June 2015 timeframe, there was a lot of excitement. A new global VP of sales had recently joined. A new CFO that was going to help us go public. A solid CMO that was literally smashing our appliance based competition. A phenomenal sales director was building out the mid-market team to help the company get a steady stream of smaller deals to get to the predictable/repeatable/sustainable place shareholders want to see. There was a feeling throughout the organization like “this rocket is about to really take off!” Then everyone gradually started seeing that it was all for naught as Jay stubbornly refused to take any advice from the new leaders he had hired and would not enable them to do what he hired them to do. It was all downhill from there. When it comes to tech companies, Zscaler will go down as one of the greatest blown opportunities by a founder/CEO in history - an exact “what should’ve been but never was” scenario. He literally had everything he needed to fulfill the vision and then some. All he had to do was get out of the way. The right product, at the right place, at the right time, with the wrong leader. The blockbuster IPO that was touted for so long was not a pipe dream or empty words. It truly could’ve and should’ve been that way. What I have expressed in this review is far from my own isolated opinion. Most everything I’ve said is right in line with the general consensus of many if not most Zscaler employees. Anyone who paints a different picture is most likely either being deceptive or is still drinking the kool aid. Don’t buy it. Everything I’ve said here has been said internally a thousand times.