Cockroach Labs

Exceptionally smart, thoughtful engineers who care deeply about the technology• The core database is genuinely impressive and technically interesting• Generally kind and collaborative culture among individual contributors• Good work-life balance relative to many startups• Remote-friendly and flexible work environment

•Inconsistent and often contradictory feedback from management •First-time managers placed in high-stakes roles without sufficient training or support •Performance expectations were vague and shifted over time •Feedback often felt disconnected from actual work quality or outcomes •Frontend and product experience work is under-prioritized and under-resourced •Tooling, testing practices, and frontend engineering maturity lag behind where they should be •Lack of clear long-term strategy for the cloud product and user experience •Career growth and promotion paths are not transparent •Leadership communication is often overly optimistic and not grounded in day-to-day reality

My Experience:

I was ultimately let go after a long period of confusing and contradictory feedback from a first-time manager. I was told my work was not meeting expectations, but those expectations were never clearly defined and frequently changed.

In one case, I was told a design document I wrote was “not good enough” and reflected poorly on my performance. Out of confusion and frustration, I had the document independently reviewed (including by an AI evaluation tool using standard software design criteria), and it was rated very highly for clarity, structure, and technical reasoning. That gap between how my work was evaluated internally and how it would be evaluated objectively elsewhere was deeply unsettling.

Rather than specific, actionable feedback, I often received vague or shifting critiques that made it impossible to understand what “good” actually looked like. Over time this created constant anxiety and eroded trust in the feedback process.

The experience felt less like a fair performance management process and more like a slow, opaque off-ramp driven by unclear expectations and managerial inexperience.

Advice to Leadership:

Invest seriously in management training, especially for first-time managers. Establish clear, stable performance expectations and ensure feedback is specific, consistent, and tied to concrete examples.

If you want to retain senior and staff-level engineers, you need a psychologically safe feedback culture where people can trust that evaluations are fair, grounded, and not constantly shifting.

Also, commit to a real long-term strategy for the cloud product and user experience, and properly resource frontend and product engineering instead of treating them as secondary to backend infrastructure.