Pure Storage

Good snacks.

Good benefits and compensation.

Managing culture is very far off from being fair. The entire manager level is controlled by Indians and has a strong favor toward ones who present themselves with fancy speech and act actively. The factor that managers use to judge you isn’t much related to what you’ve done, but mostly on how hard you present yourselves. Engineers are nice, and I have very good relationships with a lot of them. Multiple senior engineers told me that to get a good impression and review from a manager, one needs a long, fancy speech in standup that takes at least over 2 minutes, where managers usually say things like, “Let’s limit standup to 45 seconds so it doesn’t take too long.”

Obviously, managers like those who seem busy and outstanding to the higher management level, rather than those who just work. Indeed, these two types don’t necessarily conflict, but if you just focus on work but not dress yourselves with fancy words, you’d be in danger soon. In other words, engineers are just steps for managers to climb higher on their career ladder.

The worst part is, the company fires employees frequently. The strategy is they give out big packages to attract good candidates and have very poor mentorship and ramp-up processes. Once you are in, they want you to contribute immediately without much helpful guidance to ramp up. Shortly after, if you don’t meet the expectation, you’ll be put in PIP, and there’s no way out from that. I’ve been in Pure for a year and have heard people being let go monthly (just from people I know; I’m not even a social nor gossip person).

General cons are like:

• WFH is strongly un-encouraged.
• Care a lot about presenting yourself in the seat.
• Too much cross-team dependency.
• Often structure or scope changes.

Be careful when you are considering this company. Make sure you don’t mind having to socialize a lot and work on getting everyone in the company to know about you.

Stop micromanaging, focus on building the product, not building your own career as a manager.