Confluent

Above market pay Work-life balance

This company used to be an amazing place to work. But after the IPO, it completely lost course.

They have so many useless middle managers, it almost feels like there are more managers than actual tech workers. The middle managers' job is to play politics all day and mess up the lives of the workers.

All they hire in the US are salespeople, and they hardly hire any engineers in the US anymore. And you can already see the lack of innovation in the product. I still don't understand why customers buy this overpriced junk over MSK or other cloud provider products.

The management is clueless. They go and invest billions of dollars on pet projects like Flink and can't execute it properly, as they don't have good engineers anymore. The Flink offering is a multi-million dollar disaster, and no one is buying it.

The stock has been in the gutter for a long time, and it adds insult to injury to shareholders if you look at the sheer waste that the company continuously does for sales and marketing. They will randomly have useless events to fly in everyone from all over the world just to get drunk. They will randomly distribute RSUs like it's free candy and dilute the stock, while their top management continuously sells off all their holdings.

There is absolutely no fiscal discipline in this company. If you want to party, do politics, talk clichés, and don't care about your skill growth, this is the place for you. If you are not, run away from Confluent as fast as you can.

You must be living under a rock to hire managers in the age of AI.