C3.ai

Pay is decent, I suppose, and the employees who work here are nice to get along with. I definitely met some friends here, and we bonded over our suffering. The usual tech benefits like food and salary are nice.

I feel like I got good exposure to lots of different things and learned quite a bit because of that.

A few of the teams in the company have a reasonable work-life balance.

FYI, one of the onboarding tasks at the company is to write a Glassdoor review. You can assume that C3's Glassdoor rating is inflated because of this. No brand new employee is going to give a 1-2 star review.

The company has some extremely serious dysfunction.

• Lack of vision in senior leadership. They are constantly pivoting large amounts of employees between projects and ideas at the whim of leadership. They lack vision, a meaningful mission, a coherent goal, or the guts to go after something they believe in. The stated mission of the company is to be the "leading Enterprise AI provider". If you have a reading comprehension at 5th grade or above, this translates to: "We want to make a lot of money and don't care about anything else". Your mission statement should be a value statement and explain what you believe in, not how successful you want to be.

• Treat their employees poorly. Senior leadership consistently micromanages and runs a top-down company. Leadership consistently commits to deadlines and goals without any form of discussion with lower-level employees like engineering, product management, design. A customer wants an entirely new product created in a month? Sure, we'll throw a couple of engineers on it and have them work 80+ hours weeks to get it done. Leadership has to sign off on the smallest things imaginable.

• They lie to their employees all the time. They tell you that "this is the last big push, we just need one more big increment." So you work over the weekend and pull an 80-hour week, just for you to come in on Monday and have the process start all over again. I thought there was an echo when I kept hearing this every Monday: "Hey, we have a new set of 5 features that customer ABC wants and we need them by the end of this week."

• Seem to lack coherent understanding of what successful and well-adjusted behavior actually is. You simply can't build good software or meaningful products in the type of environment that the company provides. Try to avoid companies run by this Steve Jobs/Elon Musk ethos of working until you drop. Although at least those leaders had good mission statements that talked about what they believed in.

• They can't retain senior talent. Senior talent understands how to build good software, so they put up with all of this nonsense until they find their next job in 6-12 months.

• Jack of all trades, master of none. They try to solve every problem possible in business with AI. Genuinely, this can be very interesting and cool at times, but it's totally unrealistic. Again, this leads to having poorly staffed products, burnt-out employees, suboptimal software, countless shortcuts, and a backlog of bugs and improvements that would require an entirely different, fully staffed, auxiliary team to solve.

• Technology and DevEx is severely lacking quality. The Platform they have can seem pretty legit at times, but I would argue that it's over-abstracted and not flexible enough. All data is essentially stored in one data store (not distributed either). This tends to do fine for the most part, but that's not really the challenge of software, is it? The challenge of building good software is solving the edge cases, making things as seamless as possible, handling massive scale and distribution, driving deployment times to near-zero timelines, and having incredible attention to detail. They have a platform which is optimized for building applications in cookie-cutter ways so that they can try to build products (demos) as fast as possible. You'll only ever get an approximation of the solution you really want, and sometimes it's a pretty damn bad approximation when almost everything has to be in one type of data store and there's no microservice architecture.

• UI takes cookie-cutter experience to the extreme. Most of the teams building applications aren't allowed to actually develop any of their own UI components for a more customized look, feel, and UX. (At least this was the case for a very long time). All designers and engineers need to create applications that use the exact same data table, timeseries chart, definition lists, card lists. All of which amounts to a list of about 10-15 data-displaying components. "Need a box-and-whiskers plot? Use a table with 5 columns that represent the different percentiles in the box-and-whiskers plot." (This was a genuine suggestion from the UI/Platform team.)

• Leadership tries to convince you it's amazing there and the technology is incredible. When we migrated to the new version of the platform, it literally did not work for a year and a half. Countless engineering hours and weeks (years?) were wasted trying to get the new version to work. It's like they believe I don't have sensory perception or can't think for myself. I couldn't get this thing up for a week straight, and you're telling me it's the best piece of software ever made?

• Most marketing the company puts out is exaggerated or a straight-up lie, IMO. Seems pretty unethical. Leadership has a major hand in this.

• Primed to be disrupted, IMO. They actually have some products that have been staffed for a while and have a decent customer base. Problem is that those moderately successful solutions are riddled with all of the problems above, and it would just take a small, staffed company with good development practices, talent, and a reasonable environment with well-adjusted people to take everything that C3 has away from them.

Treat your employees well and have some sort of religious revelation or spiritual experience that convinces you the way you live your life is incorrect.