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Great people, great product, miserable place to write back-end software

Senior Software Engineer
Current Employee
Has worked at Datadog for 2 years
September 24, 2024
New York, New York
4.0
RecommendsPositive OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros

I get to work with smart, conscientious people. The compensation is very good, and I think the core product is quite good (there's a reason people pay for it).

I enjoy most days at work, despite my complaints below.

Cons

Virtually every developer at Datadog shudders when they hear the word "Bazel". Our approach to developer experience is so, so, broken.

There's an expectation that people should build new products in (one of the several) large monorepos, but actually getting things done in those repos is brutally slow. Just launching or testing your backend service involves waiting ages for Bazel to compile a ton of unrelated code.

On top of that, we have to use a lot of bad, underdocumented, proprietary developer tooling. If you want to spin up a new REST service/Postgres instance/whatever, expect everything to take 5-10x more effort and time than it would elsewhere. You will spend more of your time learning how to do things the some-internal-team way than actually solving business problems. Edit-compile-run loops are often an order of magnitude slower than they would be at other companies.

This mess is sometimes kind of interesting, but it is definitely not a good way to spend software developers' time.

Advice to Management

Pay more attention to developer experience. It's so broken, and the people doing surveys about it are not asking the right questions.

Additional Ratings

Work/Life Balance
4.0
Culture and Values
5.0
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
5.0
Career Opportunities
4.0
Compensation and Benefits
5.0
Senior Management
4.0

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