PTO: “Unlimited” in name only. It’s capped at 3 weeks unless an SVP ok’s it, and you can’t accrue or cash out. It used to be real unlimited PTO, but once people actually started taking time off post‑pandemic, leadership slammed the door shut. They tossed 5+ year employees an extra week to keep them quiet — conveniently, many of those folks are already in management.
RAISES AND PROMOTIONS: Raises are basically cost‑of‑living scraps. Promotions are rare, political, and often handed out based on favoritism, not performance. They also squeeze one or two benefits out of the employees each year (MLK day, PTO, RSUs, training, etc...).
MIDDLE MANAGEMENT: A full-on top‑down echo chamber. The job is to nod, agree, and drink the Kool-Aid. Independent thought is treated like a problem.
TECHNOLOGY: Veeva is not a tech company. They cling to outdated systems until they’re literally at end‑of‑life. Innovation is an afterthought. They’re late to AI and seem fine with it.
CULTURE AND CHAOS: The entire philosophy is “results now, thinking later.” It’s chaos management without any of the parts that make chaos management functional. No learning, no resilience, no trust, no team building — just chaos, pressure, and panic. Instead of building a stronger organization, they now try to hire superhumanly anti-fragile people and call it “people science,” then put them through seven interviews to prove they can survive the dysfunction leadership refuses to fix. Unscheduled tasks, conflicting priorities, half‑baked features, unstable infrastructure, surprise “urgent” requests, and change orders that appear out of thin air. The company lives in a permanent MVP mindset. About 75% of releases are fast trash — “get it right next time.” Because everything is treated like a disposable prototype, there’s no real engineering structure behind most of it. False urgency is the fuel, and speed is the only metric that matters. It works well for a brand‑new feature, but at the infrastructure, security, platform, and technology level, it’s a slow‑motion disaster: technical debt, knowledge debt, risk, and stress piling up with every release. Veeva also uses a “burn the bridge behind you” engineering method. They’ll deploy unfinished products, features, or infrastructure changes into production and then force engineering to scramble to fix the fallout before the next release. Planning, design, forethought, process — all optional.
HOLIDAYS: They eliminated MLK Day with almost no notice and offered nothing in return.
LEADERSHIP REPRESENTATION: My VP somehow managed to avoid having a single woman as a direct report. He has over 12 direct reports. Statistically interesting.
If you can survive and even thrive in chaos — and accept leadership treating chaos as a strategy — you can last here with less layoff anxiety than most software companies. Just drink the Kool‑Aid, keep your head down, and never point out incompetence. Leadership never admits mistakes, and employees are expected to quietly absorb the fallout. Veeva hires a very specific type of worker: competent but trappable, conscientious, passive to authority, and ideally a bit desperate. They avoid candidates with highly marketable skills, cut training, discourage advanced degrees, and screen for people who can tolerate dysfunction without pushing back. Conscientious employees work hard, pick up the slack, and keep the mission even when burned out. Engineering once had enough growth and autonomy to offset the chaos. Now chaos has scaled while teams haven’t, and burnout plus overscheduling have erased the ability to improve anything. Ten‑plus weekly “status” meetings leave no time to think. A good manager can make the experience workable, especially early in your career, but long‑term growth is limited. Once you’re stuck, Veeva squeezes you with low pay, no promotions, and the expectation you’ll keep absorbing chaos.
The Public Benefit Corporation structure is part altruism, part armor — it reduces layoff pressure and shields the CEO from outside accountability.