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Great Business, Terrible Place to Work

Software Engineer
Current Employee
Has worked at Databricks for 6 years
May 29, 2025
San Francisco, California
1.0
Doesn't RecommendNo CEO Opinion
Pros

The company as a whole is doing well, with good revenue numbers.

The talent bar is generally pretty high, but it's not as good as it once was, and the company is starting to lose top talent.

Cons
  • Toxic management and terrible work-life balance.
  • Becoming increasingly political, which projects you get to work on, promotions, and performance reviews have been increasingly about who you know.
  • Within AI, there's constant project churn, changing roadmaps, and a lack of product vision, leading to very few successful products.
  • Substantially decreased refreshers and compensation recently, especially for those who have been there a long time.
  • Slow career growth and promotion timelines, and no longer with the increased pay to justify it.
  • No longer really innovating or doing anything interesting as a company.
  • Still no 401k.
Advice to Management

Middle management:

Care more about growing your employees and employee wellbeing, rather than only being concerned with making yourself look good.

Upper management:

Have better product vision and leadership, rather than keep changing things and not succeeding at anything. This has led to significant churn.

Bad culture setting and cutthroat (i.e., 8% unregretted attrition targets, incredibly process-oriented, unsustainable work-life balance, slow promotions) all for efforts that will not succeed because of terrible decision-making.

Additional Ratings

Work/Life Balance
1.0
Culture and Values
2.0
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
1.0
Career Opportunities
1.0
Compensation and Benefits
2.0
Senior Management
1.0

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