Terribly Cultured Company - Software Engineer Stacklet Employee Review

1.0
25 June 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

After reading through some of other reviews, I also agree that there was huge product potential that is being wasted with awful direction. The work-life balance is good and the company is full remote. But, these are roughly all I personally feel are the benefits of Stacklet.

Cons

I implore anyone who is considering joining to look at the extreme distribution of reviews here on Glassdoor and I think may tell you how this place operates. I'd like to separate my thoughts into 3 sections: Tech, Culture, and Execution. The Tech. The tech is largely built on legacy systems with little to no understanding of SaaS architecture or security. The development experience is confusing as there simply is no debugging experience for some of the backend services. In addition, there are clearly scale issues already occurring on a system with very little customers. The technical decision making is made from a very small group of people and although they provide "lip-service" that their doors are open, it's far from reality. I agree it is hard to get any movement without having the right ear. The Culture. This is by far the worst thing about Stacklet. I agree with a few of the other reviews here, there is cultural baggage and nepotism from leadership and other people who all came from the same company in the past. If you're not sure, take a look at Linkedin and see the distribution of employees and people in leadership positions. Take a look at the distribution of opinions about Stacklet. There seems to be 2 realities here, but most likely 2 separate experiences working at this company. There is a lack of ability to debate your views here at Stacklet and there are some engineering leaders with short tempers. There isn't diversity of thought here, not to mention a lack of diversity here as well. There is a lack of transparency at the company as well. The decisions are made by a select few and there is a lack of review of the behavior of leadership. Lastly, I'd like to point out that every negative review left here is met with "lip-service" of moving fast, disagree and execute, take risks, or open door policy. These are just words and I don't believe the leaders actually mean what they say. Just look at how the Head of People is gaslighting everyone who leaves a bad review. The Execution. There is a huge open source following for Cloud Custodian that is being squandered with poor leadership and poor execution. With all the technical debt that has already been built, the company moves extremely slowly for a startup and has a difficult time delivering on what customers are asking for. Do you like to understand the business reason for a feature? Good luck on that. Product management is whimsical and honestly just looks like guessing with little direction. There is active rumblings between the founders and leaders as well.

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Stacklet Response
3y
Thank you for your feedback. We value your input in helping shape Stacklet’s culture and future. In response to your areas of concern: Tech As an early stage startup much of our technology is still nascent. Today, we build on native cloud services and serverless. Tomorrow, that may change. The market Stacklet is pursuing has workloads on every major cloud provider and governance of those assets requires managing complexity. Part of Stacklet’s challenge is making this software scale so that it is useful for very small customers and very large customers at the same time. Over the past year, we’ve hired people with much more experience in running production SaaS products and the product has improved immensely, but as usual there are always things that need to be improved. Culture It is a fairly common strategy for early-stage startups to seed the company by hiring people directly from the networks of the founders and first employees. Stacklet hired some of the best talent in open source technologies from within our networks. We are proud of our team and excited to continue growing and expanding outside of our direct networks. Based on feedback from everyone on the team we have taken steps to increase diversity as it relates to hiring outside of our networks and to hiring diverse team members, including the addition of our Talent Acquisition Director. To that end, 80% of our last 10 hires have come from sourcing outside of our networks and 60% of those have been diverse hires. Execution We are excited about the Cloud Custodian community and want to serve our community and our customers as best as possible. As we continue to move forward and deliver on what customers are asking for, we have added Product Management leadership to continue to clarify our priorities and direction to best serve our community. Cloud Native Compliance and FinOps is still a relatively new field (the FinOps Foundation hasn’t even celebrated their 2nd birthday yet!) so we feel that building on a solid open source foundation will lead to better results for customers.

Explore other reviews about Stacklet

5.0
18 Apr 2022
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great people, supportive CEO, fast-moving startup with great opportunities to grow into areas you're interested in. They care about people and not just about the job to get done.

Cons

Still finding their footing on some processes and changes at different stages of growth. Typical startup growing pains. Motivations are great but communication isn't always perfect.

5.0
14 Apr 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Working with incredibly smart and caring humans who give 100% of themselves to helping build a wonderful culture, product, and company. Remote work - I'm a massive fan of building healthy remote cultures and am happy to be part of leading on that with Stacklet. We're invested in caring for our team - fun virtual team events, wellness initiatives, unlimited PTO, benefits, etc. Our executive team cares about the lives of everyone at Stacklet and it shows in how we treat people. Transparency - our management team makes a point of sharing where Stacklet is (in all aspects of that word) in an easy and transparent way.

Cons

There aren't cons, actually - we're a fairly early stage start-up with good customer traction. There's a ton of work to be done as we continue to build the company. However, thus far we are doing all we can to scale and grow in a healthy way. We're not perfect and we have (and will continue to) make mistakes, but I've yet to see us get stuck. We learn from our mistakes, shift as quickly as we can, and do our best to listen to our many brilliant voices whenever possible.

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