Datadog

Great product and lots of traction.

Great benefits and compensation.

Good amount of internal mobility.

Great colleagues.

Overall good engineering culture.

Despite the cons below, I think the C-level management is as focused as ever.

Management has staged a coup during the pandemic.

The company used to be quite lean and the chain of command quite short. This gave ICs a clear sense of who was in charge and a short feedback loop. High-level decisions were made by people who understood the product and had participated in its engineering (i.e., there was no BS).

Nowadays the org feels more and more like an onion, and management cares more about the size of their empire than anything else. Engineering projects are given no measure of success (or ones that change quarter after quarter as things get worse) and are allowed to continue for the purpose of justifying hiring.

We have regular company-wide surveys that track trust in management. It used to be very high. It went so low they stopped making the per-department numbers public.

I understand that the massive increase in management was well-meaning and meant as a basis for growth. We unfortunately picked up some empire-building people along the way.

Cut down on the politics. Allow failed projects to die. Establish a culture where it’s okay to say we tried something and it failed.

Remove management layers. I don’t need an EM1, an EM2, a director, a senior director, a VP, and a senior VP. That’s ridiculous. We aren’t Google.