Splunk

Great product. There was no one in the market that could do what Splunk does. Splunk is still years ahead of the competition.

Really smart engineers who understand customer issues.

• Amazing support and customer onboarding team
• Amazing marketing team

Great energy

While Splunk is a great product, there is much to be desired in terms of software engineering maturity and accountability.

Some of the biggest issues with Splunk that are a pain point for many:

• Many of the senior engineering staff have huge egos and are not really open to listening to new or fresh perspectives.
• Many engineers are afraid of speaking up and just go about doing their work. Compensation + Stock is great, so why ruffle feathers?
• There is no transparent way of doing performance reviews for your team. Reviews are done via email in an Excel sheet. Because many are afraid of their managers, most don't say things that need to be said. I hope someone in Splunk HR reads this and implements one of the many solutions in the market for doing 360-reviews. Come on guys, we can't be using Excel and email in the year 2013 :)
• No well-defined engineering process and an absolutely chaotic environment. Senior Engineering leads with huge egos, for whom you can't really give anonymous feedback, are a big hurdle in doing the right thing.
• Huge technical debt causing slower and riskier development. Again, people with big egos get in the way.
• Little motivation to become agile and lean because of customer rollout cycles.

Great vision and product. Can't complain there.

Please take a look at the engineering management. Concerned engineers are dying to give feedback and make Splunk better, but are afraid of their managers. Allow a way to solicit anonymous quarterly feedback, and you will see the issues facing the team.

It is depressing that I have to go to Glassdoor to solve in-house problems. Failure to fix the people and process in Splunk will be a big mistake.