Pros: - Everything I hoped for and more. - Distributed by design, the culture needed for this kind of thing to actually work and scale appears to be successfully transmitted. - You talk to older employees, and almost all of them are surprised that it has scaled. - The organization tries to measure and improve employee engagement. - Thoughtful leadership and approach to solving problems in the competitive market has been inspiring to watch. - Leadership really tries to make employees take advantage of paid volunteer time off and "spacetime." - I regularly have peak experiences as I meet different people across the org and hear their opinions on topics from hiring to leadership. It's affecting me positively as a human being. - Autonomy is required for this thing to work, and the organization somehow has nailed it. Makes me feel almost bitter toward past management in contrast because the teams self-organize and execute without being micromanaged. - True engineering company. Engineers are orthogonal to management/leadership, not below them. - Cool problems to work on, and lots of them. Freedom to move to areas of interest.

Cons: There's not much room for juniors to come in as the company is distributed. I don't believe that someone extremely junior could get what they need. The average age in the company is older as a result of not hiring juniors. This is not really a con, just unfortunate that people can't experience Elastic until they are further on in their career. Onboarding can be disorienting. Distributed companies can highlight mental health risks due to social isolation. It requires self-management. There is sometimes some ambiguity in direction, which is challenging to some people. You have to be comfortable standing up for yourself and tackling problems, as you do get a lot of autonomy and freedom. However, that means that the quality of the individuals working in a team is forefront in its success. There's explosive growth, which causes the need to shuffle and redesign the company and working styles. You need to be comfortable and open to handle the change.

Pros: - Decent compensation and benefits. - Shut it down days (although I think they are being rolled back). - Interesting stack to work on.

Cons: For a company that has always been distributed, they do not do it well. There are fundamental communications problems. Perhaps if you get on the right team with a supportive manager and teammates, this would be different, but it was not my experience. It's an everyone-for-themselves environment, which makes it hard to integrate or feel welcome as a newcomer. Weak onboarding has a lot of outdated or incorrect information in it. The same goes for offboarding; there are many holes in the process. Hands-off leadership: I heard from my hiring manager on the first day and pretty much never again. The second manager was newer but was fairly hands-off, unsupportive, and did not want to facilitate team collaboration. Clear issues with project planning were highlighted to them, which they ignored. They also allowed arrogant, negative behaviors to occur in meetings. Arrogant team members: Their source code would have you believe there are no stupid questions and that you should always ask, but when you do, they either repeat what you've said and make it look like you don't know what you're talking about or make you feel stupid for asking. I also had snippets of the source code recited to me in meetings like we were in a cult. Unfortunately, the majority of those I encountered are working in silos, so project planning, requirements gathering, and decision-making are quite difficult. Layoffs left a terrible atmosphere to work in and constant fear of losing the job (I left myself in the end as it was so bad). Coupled with this, they were still planning a Global All Hands in Orlando, FL, which seemed like a slap in the face to those laid off. I'm not sure if this went ahead, as there is conveniently no coverage of it on social media. We were told on the company All Hands that Elastic had hired carefully and there would not be layoffs. Then a few weeks later, there were. Tone-deaf team member had no sympathy for layoffs. They said, "Oh well, that's to be expected, and it's mostly recruiters." (It was not just recruiters, by the way; it was every team). A lot of Slack over-sharing by some to make themselves look good. The same names kept popping up in this regard, always having something to say, but nearly always not related to the work at hand. There seemed to be clear favoritism for this type of person, and if you are not like that, it's harder to do well there. Expenses: On top of all that, I returned my laptop promptly and filed shipping expenses, which they state will be reimbursed, but I've had about two months of back and forth trying to get my money back due to errors on their end. They have stopped responding to me now. It's a really bad look for this company, and I imagine others who have left recently are having similar issues.

Pros: - Great work-life balance - Interesting problems to work on

Cons: - Pay not up to par with FAANG or similar companies