CloudScale Reviews

Absolutely bizarre (in a bad way) experience from start to finish, here's why: - They started off taking 2 months to get back to me after submitting my resume. They heavily trash talked their HR dept as an excuse. Turns out they don't even have an HR dept, which I'll touch on more later - During my interviews, I asked about company size/team size and they straight up said they had about 20 developers on the team I'd be going to and several teams about that size. In reality, there were 4 devs when I got there and 2 when I left. The "management" staff didn't actually exist either, only the CEO and COO were actually still at the company. There was no HR dept to go through when I ended up having issues - Being that this is a software development company, I had a look at their website and things got even weirder, links were going to nowhere (#), tons of errors on their web pages, etc. Their LinkedIn activity is just the same 4 or 5 posts reposted over the past several years... Just overall weird and red flags everywhere - definitely on me for going forward with this job after seeing that - Because there was no HR dept, literally no one in HR whatsoever, I had to give my bank account and routing info straight to the COO. Over the phone. I am not kidding. But because I had already given 2 weeks at my other job, I didn't have much of a choice. They asked for this info 2 days prior to my start - Equipment (laptop, dock, etc.) arrived literally the day before I started, which wouldn't have been a big deal but most of the equipment didn't work with the laptop for whatever reason - they just sent me the wrong equipment. Asked for a replacement, took a month to get to me and it was still the wrong equipment. So I finished my time there without being able to use anything but the laptop - There was no onboarding, which isn't inherently a bad thing but given all the other circumstances it just made my first few weeks a lot more rough - As a developer, really nice to have some structure. There was none of that at Cloudscale. Expectations were all over the place. The developers that actually existed were online sometimes until 10 or 11 at night (that's even considering the timezone difference for a few of them). And it seemed that they expected me to do the same. Really not a dev-friendly work environment at all - Further note on expectations, I was told constantly that I was "killing it" because I was pushing 2 to 3 times the cards through that the other devs were getting done. I was handling client issues - clients were very vocal about how much they liked working with me, I was staying on much later than I'd like to pick up others' slack. All trying to work hard because Cloudscale bragged about their 25% bonus and their 20% raises during my interview. When it came time for my year end bonus and raise, despite "killing it" for several months, I recieved a 2% bonus and about a 7% raise. Still not sure about that one. So if you're looking at this company and hearing those big bonus/raise numbers, absolutely do not make a decision based on that because you will not ever see that money. Cannot stress this enough - There was very poor direction involved in putting together design docs and this would trickle down into dev time heavily. Essentially, work statements proposed to the client weren't really thought through and that caused the dev team to get behind very quickly on work on top of having tons of "found" work with new projects/features. This was almost always the cause of devs being on until 10/11pm. There was just too much work and not enough dev time. This was by far the worst work/life balance I've ever experienced - prepare to be overworked - Another red flag, during my interviews, the company bragged about several big name clients. Just like the dev team size, they also greatly exaggerated here. Can't say if that's changed in a year, but as a dev do not expect to have any variety of clients/tech to work with Overall, I've gotta say this wasn't even a real company. Technically, legally maybe. But as an employee, it was clearly just a few guys who have a connection at Microsoft. Beyond that it was an enormous mess and I cannot at all recommend this place. I'm looking at the ratings below trying to figure out where I can at least give a single star - I can't honestly give any credit for any category, it was that bad.