Elastic

Elastic offers a great work-life balance, has some really impressive tech and cool technical challenges, and the coworkers are excellent.

The compensation is pretty fair. The company is no longer a startup, but it is not a massive corporation yet.

More bureaucracy is slipping into the workflows.

Decisions from senior leadership, even pre-2026 layoffs, are harder to understand.

When I started, it felt as though all decisions and priorities were communicated effectively. As an individual contributor, I knew what our goals were and how my day-to-day work directly contributed to that.

In 2026, that feeling was gone. It also became apparent that the wider market didn't approve of it, seeing as how the stock prices dropped.

There are also more miscommunications occurring between managers and direct reports. I was also blindsided by having positive feedback from my manager and having no RSUs awarded.

Take a good look at what the senior leadership is doing. Elastic should be foundational for AIs, however the company has failed to gain a foothold, and the stock price has been dropping.

It seems like the only real reason the company makes money is due to the security product; the other products are much harder to use and lack mind-share across external developers.

The goals of observability don't seem like they will address foundation challenges they have. It takes a lot to get an Elastic deployment running, and even using the managed offering there are a lot of configuration steps.

Also addressing the layoffs: getting rid of 20% of engineering as part of the 7% total company reduction sends a strong signal to those who remain, and it's not one of confidence.