Pros
Granicus is unable to attract anyone in any market worldwide with any actual SRE skills because they pay well below the low end of the market rate for SREs. They often cite that it's because they're a government contractor, yet there are folks in the C Suite receiving high salaries and enormous bonuses. They will take anyone who can spell Azure or has heard of SQL as an SRE, often promoting from Support since no external candidates accept their offers. They will take a person of the street, give them an SRE title, then blame them when they can't do the job like a person with 10 years related experience. Any external hire who does have actual SRE skills quits within a couple of months once they realize what a clown show they've joined. As an SRE, you mostly do Tier 3 work as an escalation point for other teams. You're forced to use AI extensively for automations and tools that essentially don't work because you don't actually have any coding skills to check the code the AI wrote. I think they thought they could get people who had no skills and would accept low salaries and have them use AI to do their jobs. It is not going well. The layoffs. My god, the layoffs. Granicus has laid off a large number of people who knew the products and worked hard in favor of outsourcing cheaper labor to make their profits seem larger. This means more escalations for you as an SRE/Tier 3 which translates to less time to do actual SRE work or upskill. They will say no more layoffs while doing more layoffs. The culture declined within days of the 2024 election. The CEO is obsessed with Elon Musk. He got rid of the DEI policies immediately and praised DOGE. Any videos you see on LinkedIn about how great the products are or how they're innovating citizen engagement with governments are false. This company is crumbling from the inside either purging its talent purposely or losing it as people move to better opportunities at companies that are actually great places to work. Everyone is overworked and angry all the time. It's every person for themselves since no one is safe from layoffs and it shows in how people treat each other and knowledge horde in an attempt to protect themselves. Even most managers are out for themselves and will throw direct reports under the bus to protect themselves. My manager openly laughed at us in meetings. He belittled and scolded us like a bad father would a child he thinks isn't measuring up. It's a disgusting atmosphere. I thought the job I had once at a call center where I was made to swindle students and elderly people into getting high interest credit cards was the worst place I'd ever work. I was wrong. It's Granicus.
Cons
- Frequent layoffs - low salaries - unrealistic metrics - rude, condescending managers - SRE role is not real - overworked, understaffed - negative culture - excessive reliance on AI
