Okta

Okta is a good company. The people mean well and try to live by it. Todd McKinnon and Freddy have done a phenomenal job building out the company to where it is now.

The product is a leader in identity management. Quite frankly, if you have SSO, MFA, or just need a more extensible LDAP, you would be a fool to not consider Okta top-of-mind. The company is winning big and making money.

The engineers are talented. Perhaps not the most talented group I've worked with, but they get the job done. The top-end of the talent is very high, and there are sufficient paths for growth in both engineering and management leadership. If you do your job, the promotions will come.

Okta tries hard to be fair in compensating you according to the market. You will not be under-paid, but Okta will not go out-of-band to make sure you are exceptionally well-compensated.

If you want to learn about how to grind out and build up an enterprise SaaS company, there is no better place. Okta will instill in you respect for process and why/when they get added. How to get a flock of engineers to march to the same drummer and build products. You will have fire-support whenever you need it, but you need to own your feature, own your product, and own your career.

Okta is building a mini-brand and other companies know about Okta. I can personally say that I can use my experience and my reputation as having worked at Okta at other enterprise SaaS companies with a surprising amount of leverage.

The mobility team is a mess. The engineering management lacks leadership and vision for how to evolve the product, grow the team, and effectively compete with the other OMM vendors. This is made worse by the incompetent product management there. Okta should have a tremendous advantage over the existing OMM vendors because it is anchored by the premier identity management and SSO product. It is an incredibly opportunity missed to dominate that vertical, and Todd needs to shake that area up.

Engineering managers, by and large, are not great. Greg (the VP) tries to do well, but is more or less the only engineering manager who has the skills needed to help grow a team. There are a couple of others as well, but most of engineering management either lacks the emotional intelligence to understand how to keep engineers happy and productive, is hands-off to an extreme, is really an engineer promoted far too fast, or has some other major flaw that keeps them from being an effective manager. Despite the fact that we have career tracks, career development is basically nonexistent in so far as working with managers to acquire new skills and build up careers. Luckily, Okta has some fairly good technical leads and product leads for the teams; otherwise, engineers would just spin in circles.

Some attrition in a fast-growing company is acceptable and perhaps even desirable to get fresh blood in and open positions for them to grow into, but a lot of the attrition at Okta comes from bad management. That is a real bummer.

I really like Okta, so it's difficult for me to give this feedback. But I really think Okta needs it, and I'm hoping for an improvement to make Okta great again.

To Todd: Glassdoor doesn't have a lot of engineering reviews for Okta, and there is a reason why. Engineers have gotten used to dealing with a certain level of nonsense, and that's not okay. We're too small to have engineers become apathetic to the product and to the customer.

Engineering management at Okta cannot be left solely to Hector and Greg. If you see a problem, please jump in with some solutions and push those solutions. Make the engineers understand that these come from you. As a founder, you have a certain aura and panache that the other executives don't have. As an SVP at Salesforce, you know how to run engineering organizations successfully, and you should push forward policies that will engage engineers more.

To Greg: Please shake up the teams that are struggling and re-evaluate the criteria for engineering management. We both know that middle management at Okta is lacking, and this is something that can and should be fixed.