Descartes Labs Reviews

4.1

66% would recommend to a friend

(25 total reviews)

Phil Fraher

75% approve of CEO

50% positive business outlook

Descartes Labs has an employee rating of 4.1 out of 5 stars, based on 25 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The Descartes Labs employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

25 reviews
1.0
12 June 2019

Inexperienced C-level execs, lack of clear vision and leadership

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Exciting domain, opportunity to work with many smart and accomplished scientists. HQ location (Santa Fe) is lovely.

Cons

Upper management is inexperienced and have too high of an opinion of themselves. They don't pay attention to experienced people but rather hire them as window dressing. To the extent, they do PR around them being hired to make the company look good, but ignore/overrule any advice they provide and they end up quitting. In the past 18 months, 3 executives quit from development to finance and marketing, some after being with the company no more than a year.

avatar
Descartes Labs Response
7y
At Descartes Labs we want to foster open communication about our workplace and culture. Of course, this is not representative of the experience we want for our staff and would encourage you to bring your thoughts to a member of the Leadership or People Team for discussion.
4.0
17 Apr 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Four day workweek (essentially) Solid compensation Extremely cool technology/product

Cons

This company doesn't really know where it's going, an immature market that can't really take advantage of what DL has to offer, and leadership that is trying to jam a square peg (consultative spec work) into a round hole (SaaS business model).

5.0
24 June 2020

Great company doing meaingful work

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I have never worked with smarter peers than here at Descartes Labs and with the recent changes in leadership (our interim CEO was also fantastic) we're finally getting competent direction and governance to go with it. Remote sensing is a super interesting domain that is rapidly evolving as new tech is developed and new sensors come online. Meaningful work that can actually make a difference in the world. Geospatial data is highly underused and can help in numerous meaningful applications such as climate change, disease monitoring and forecasting, and ecological monitoring. Very challenging technical problems - geospatial data makes other people's big data problems seem like a joke. Awesome and humbling to work with people like our CTO Mike Warren who can tackle these sorts of problems over lunch.

Cons

Still shrugging off the legacy of bad management. Very complex domain can be overwhelming for some.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 25 Reviews

Glassdoor has 27 Descartes Labs reviews submitted anonymously by Descartes Labs employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Descartes Labs is right for you.