Cloudera

My reasons for working here:

• Meaningful work
• Personal and professional growth
• Contributes with a great team
• Keeps me well-fed

More about "meaningful work": Cloudera is at the center of big data. Big data represents a transformative technology trend that opens up new ways of doing business and discovering science.

Speaking from an insider's view, all the hyped reports about big data are in fact underestimating its impact – big data actually represents a major step in the scientific method, on par with past steps such as the acceptance of quantitative measurement and multivariate statistics.

We are seeing some of the emerging new science from fields such as health care and agriculture, but those are only a tiny tip of the iceberg. And organizations at the center of these scientific discoveries stand poised to immediately extract value and profit from them.

Their data analysis platform vendors therefore stand to share these newly created value and likewise profit. Regardless of Cloudera's commercial success or failure, it is a once-in-a-lifetime type company in terms of bringing a very key technology to the world.

More about "great team": Cloudera's employees often are the best in the industry at what they do. This goes for both engineering and non-engineering roles.

Even at 800+ employees, the company remains small enough for engineering and non-engineering roles to regularly interact. This facilitates cross-functional, generalist type learning from the best.

E.g., marketing and engineering working together to put out materials that's on-message and technically bulletproof; sales and engineering speaking side-by-side to address customer concerns and win competitive deals; recruiting and engineering working side-by-side to share excitement about a technology trend that's not yet fully appreciated in the popular press.

Still plenty of upside to stock valuation, even after many rounds of funding.

Alternate opportunities I declined:

Many places I did not even interview at because I knew the company was already a bad fit. The eventual short list and the reasons I chose Cloudera over them:

• A post-IPO big data company targeting a specific industry vertical – Cloudera has a bigger addressable market.
• An established enterprise platform vendor – Cloudera is far more nimble and focused and ambitious.
• A media company looking to set up a big data shop – Cloudera allows me to be at the center of big data development versus at only the user/customer end.

Bonus: Dual headquarters in San Francisco and Palo Alto.

The SF office still retains much of the quirky start-up atmosphere, with an entire floor painted in robot themes with robot names as conference rooms. There is also a game room with Guitar Hero and Xbox and many board games and a collection of cat pictures.

The PA office has a totally gorgeous pond with fountains and water lilies and surrounded by willow trees and frequented by ducks. Many lunches and refreshing walks and productive meetings took place around there.

Cloudera is going through growing pains. There are some politics and unhelpful staring contests. On the bright side, upper management is enlightened enough to try to fix it, and the rank-and-file is resourceful enough to skirt around it.

Watch the company culture. It is at constant risk of becoming stale too quickly.

Have open channels to the rank-and-file, and appropriately reward and censure.

Watch the compensation with peers. Cloudera is constantly competing for talent with major tech companies who are ever willing to match and exceed compensation, including current value on stock.

Cloudera's unique position and the teams' commitment and idealism does help with talent retention, but it is no secret that Cloudera's employees are sought after and can dictate compensation elsewhere.

Keep on leading by example. The personal examples of the upper management are observed and noted. Their day-to-day openness, humbleness, dedication, willingness to admit fault, and share praise all go a long way towards setting up the company for long-term success.