Veeva Systems

• The CEO is a hands-on technical visionary, humble, down-to-earth, and very smart. You can search for Veeva on YouTube to find some videos where the CEO talks about the company and its amazing growth. Once you see these videos for yourself, you will realize that some of the negative comments from other reviewers here are either fake or posted by incompetent former employees.

• The company is very profitable and has achieved stellar growth in the last few years.

• The company has great vision and values. Employees are encouraged to freely move around between roles and teams based on their interests.

• Veeva HQ in Pleasanton has a very modern and vibrant office building, offering free lunch and free snacks every day, free fitness classes, and is conveniently located near the BART station.

• The company culture is focused on getting things done fast – everything is very efficient. IT and facilities are very fast and responsive, unlike many other larger companies in the Bay Area. The software development processes and release timelines are very efficiently structured and predictable.

• Excellent opportunities exist to work in a variety of software roles, including cloud services, DevOps, mobile application development, automated testing, and product management.

• Most of the product managers are really talented and come up with new features that add value and help win more customers.

• Flexible PTO policy in addition to the year-end break.

• Decent RSU package.

• Salary and benefits are slightly lower compared to other cloud software companies. The 401K match is very low. There is no bonus or profit sharing.

• Too much importance is given to the UX team and product managers while the opinions of experienced developers and QA engineers are ignored. Even if the UX or product manager has very little practical working experience, they dominate meetings and make final decisions. The typical technical discussion ends with "Just do as you are told." This results in customer-facing defects that could have been avoided by focusing on proper design and "doing it right the first time" instead of "doing it in less time."

• Even though lunch is free, sometimes the food is terrible because the chefs like to put their salty sauce in everything. A typical entrée involves a lot of tomato sauce with a lot of salt. Even fruit salads are not spared from the attack of the salty sauce.

• The December holiday/shutdown has fixed dates, making it difficult for employees who have family or relatives in Asia and need a longer break and flexibility with air travel.

• Lack of inclusiveness. Some teams have people from certain races who speak their native language at their cubicles and also at lunch, thus excluding others. This can be seen with Asian and Russian native language speakers who have loud technical discussions with each other in their native dialect, thereby excluding other team members from contributing to the discussion. However, this issue is not unique to Veeva and is typical of many Bay Area companies.

Advice for CEO:

The work skills that most engineers gain at Veeva are very valuable to other cloud and internet software companies, and they are willing to pay top dollar for good talent. This trend can be seen with many Veeva employees who work for a while, learn valuable skills, and then leave to join companies like Workday, Google, Salesforce, and Facebook.

Consider providing better compensation and benefits to the hard-working engineers so that they stay longer and help Veeva achieve greater success and profitability. Encourage a work culture of collaboration and consensus instead of "do as you are told". Consider changing the company vision from "Do the right thing" to "Do the right thing the first time, even if it takes more time."

Advice for middle management:

Leaders who refuse to listen will eventually be surrounded by people who have nothing significant to say.