Splunk

There are a ton of things to like about Splunk in Boulder: the area and facilities are fantastic, the compensation is fantastic, but perhaps most important to me is that the people and culture are fantastic. And that means that when we have problems, we eventually work them out.

The Boulder site is just one tiny part of Splunk, and that can be a problem. But so far, our leadership has done a very good job of getting us more deeply engaged with the rest of the company.

The Boulder site primarily supports two services: incident management ("making on-call suck less") and cloud observability. These are both pretty cool services, well-aligned with current and emerging best practices.

As a manager, one of the things that I like is that my team and I can approach anyone with questions about anything: there aren't many toxic personalities, there isn't much that's taboo, and the politics aren't bad at all. Instead, people are very friendly and eager to work with you.

Of course, everything isn't perfect, and we've got our share of not-perfect:

• Commuting into Boulder can be aggravating. We set up Tuesdays and Thursdays for people to work from home, and that seems to have helped a lot.

• Some of our older systems have a lot of technical debt. We're quickly improving them, but it feels like we're not doing it quickly enough.

• Some Splunk processes aren't very mature yet, and so it can sometimes be a challenge to get administrative work done.

• Sometimes Splunk seems to overreach with standardization, and we end up getting pressure to comply with a mediocre or poor standard rather than lead & excel with something better. The Boulder culture is very agile, devops, and start-up oriented, and a lot of Splunk product and project oversight is waterfall and very dated. So far, we're navigating this difference okay, but it's absolutely a challenge.

• We also get a lot of pressure to "eat our own dogfood" – which is sometimes great. But it's bad when you're a cat and are pressured to eat dogfood.

You're doing a ton of things really well. But the entire company could benefit from a little less standardization and a focus on delivering value over delivering it exactly this way. And we can always use more help as a remote site in getting more integrated into the rest of the company.