Pros: - True remote culture - Some good managers and people with passion - Good compensation & benefits

Cons: - Too many management layers without proper decision-makers. - Managers and engineers are afraid to make decisions. This is a result of the last layoff, which was clearly top-level mismanagement. - Personal opinions are valued over common goals. This creates chaos and makes products lack vision.

Pros: Engineering-driven culture, permanent remote work, flexible schedule.

Cons: Permanent remote work isn't for everyone.

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 Weak onboarding has a lot of outdated or incorrect information in it.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.