Cloudera Employee Reviews about "open source"

Pros

Top Level Management are technical guys but more importantly Arun and the leadership team care about their employees which is generally missing in similar sized companies. Overall employee friendly atmosphere be it WFH, Cab Flexibility.

Cons

Perks were better when it was Hortonworks. Technology even though legacy and is being licensed in the Cloud World, the overall development and release process is very slow because of tight integration with Open Source Projects.

Pros

Great open source oriented company. Full support given for open source contributions and get Apache badges committer and PMC. At the same time we need to work on proprietary software which also works like an in-house open source community. Linux, MBP desktops, big monitors, nice offices. Very nice workplace.

Cons

Apache Hadoop and related open source components are far from being perfect. Big legacy codebases, low coding quality, awful testing coverage and quality, spaghetti bloatware everywhere. Given all this you have to work on though, complicated distributed problems and deliver reliable solutions. Not easy. Cloudera gets money from support. Support is not easy, because of the above. Escalations are raised every so often, because customers are running into bugs all over the place. In house developments are also way overcomplicated and not maintained properly. Overall: good money for a challenging work.

Pros

Cloudera is a good place to work as an engineer. I can see that the company really takes care of their employees and I feel a sense of loyalty because of this. Work-life balance - From unlimited PTO to "unplug" days that force everyone to take time away from work; Cloudera really does "walk-the-talk" in ensuring there is a sustainable work-life balance. Peers - I have been fortunate to work with lots of smart people at Cloudera that are experts in numerous disciplines. You'll probably work with the person who wrote the book on subject X at some point Management - Management focuses on transparency and regularly makes themselves available to answer questions from rank-and-file employees. Management seems to genuinely care about the employee experience. Growth - The company is reorienting itself to head-off competitors and the ever-evolving competitive landscape. This can be chaotic, but also provides interesting challenges and opportunities to learn and grow. If you want to engineer big data products, Cloudera is the place to be.

Cons

Lacks clear direction - A clear direction is rarely shared by everyone. It doesn't feel like we are all focused on moving in the same direction. Major initiatives do not seem well-organized and can be chaotic. Overseas hiring - Most of the company's hiring is occurring overseas in lower-cost markets. If you lose an Engineer in the US or UK you're most likely going to have to back-fill with someone from a lower cost market who doesn't have as much experience or knowledge. Remote first? - Cloudera is trying to evolve into a remote-first company (as many others are too), but not making enough progress in this area. Home office - There is minimal assistance in maintaining a home office for remote workers. The company only provides a laptop and a one-time stipend which won't even cover the cost of a desk. You'll have to pay for everything else out-of-pocket. Open source - I used to enjoy contributing to open source projects as part of my day-to-day job. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case due to the company's evolving product strategy.

Pros

- Face paced, execution focused culture with a huge dose of humanity - Intelligent, experienced co-workers, many of whom have long tenures and believe in the tech/long-term prospects of the company - Management and colleagues care about your overall work experience and career progression - Lot's of challenging problems to work when you're trying to make an open source software business with a complex product work at scale Bottom line: people are respectful of your time and life and aren't political. It's a high energy atmosphere where you wake up excited to go to work.

Cons

- Scaling an open-source software business based on support is difficult. - A merger is highly disruptive so it takes time to get back into execution mode. I would say we've been through the worst of this for 2 months and it's definitely showing. - Dealing with general pessimism from outside analysts and a low stock price isn't for everyone. - Still not a huge organization by some standards so it's not a place to get "lost" in the mix. It's very much all hands on deck.

Pros

The company is very transparent. All-hands meetings happen regularly with very open Q&A sessions. A lot of effort is put into collecting feedback from employees and customers, improving efficiency of communication across the company and communicating decisions and their rationale back. Despite occasional changes in leadership, massive growth, and several events that might cause most companies to become more secretive, the company has remained this way: very open, and upfront. Most employees are very passionate about the product and what it can do. All managers that I've worked for or known well are very invested in helping their employees be effective, and balancing company-wide goals with individual interests and ambitions. Although the company is not perfect, people tend to be open to admitting that, are aware of the short-comings and work to correct them in reasonable time frames.

Cons

Sometimes there's a bit of cultural rift in the company, between projects that are open-source and projects that are proprietary. The company has an excellent policy for deciding what should be proprietary that I think most people are aware of, but there's still sometimes a gap in how teams want to work or how the individual team members are used to working as a result. It's been a long time since I saw this causing any real problems, though.

Pros

- People. The top reason I work at Cloudera are the people. I love my managers and the team I work with. Very smart folks yet fun to work with. - Founders / Executives. I've worked in tech for decades and I really like the founders and, for the most part, the executive team as well. One of the co-founders still hangs out late nights for hackathons and gaming with engineers. Overall I find the executive team very approachable, and they actually listen to people below them in the org chart. - Open source development. If you want to be an active open-source developer, Cloudera is a great place to be. The majority of our codebase is changed open-source first, then those changes are brought back into our repositories.

Cons

- Not all managers are as great as mine. Luckily, movement within the company is encouraged. - The dark side of open source development: It can be harder to make changes quickly since you need community consensus. This is normal, but can be frustrating when you own a feature with a deadline.

Pros

Everything you read in the positive reviews are true. Great leadership team, fantastic rank-and-file, huge market opportunity, meaningful technology that adds genuine knowledge and value to society at large.

Cons

Cons will be the focus of this review. Cloudera is at a critical juncture. The following is written out of sincere hope that Cloudera can improve. Potential new Clouderans - you have an opportunity to contribute to the solution; don't add to the problem. (1) Problematic engineering middle management. There are a few poisonous apples who are dragging down their teams and the company culture. Good managers are not being praised and rewarded/promoted. Well-meaning mediocre managers are not getting opportunities to train/improve. Manager hiring is starting to slide - poisonous apples and mediocre managers start to bring in people that lead to nepotism and empire-building. Leadership team have to spend too much energy playing adjudicator and diplomat regarding middle-management petty fights or rank-and-file pointing out dubious decisions. (2) Diluted Cloudera culture. Cloudera had a unique culture that was once the envy of other companies. It was respectful and truly open, where good ideas can get embraced regardless of origin and rank. Several things diluted the culture. (2.1) Open discussion somehow evolved into grandstanding. When that was rightly discouraged, there was collateral chilling effect on positive discussion. (2.2) Long-tenured employees emphasizing their experience lead to perceptions of diva-like behavior, however unintentionally. This compounds the chilling effect on open discussion. It also encourages problematic middle management to hide behind seasoned employees while eschewing hard-calls and accountability. (2.3) Parts of management becoming infatuated with and trying to copy cultures at other companies, without critically assessing Cloudera's unique strengths and other cultures well-known weaknesses. This is disheartening to the rank-and-file because their peers outside of Cloudera are already panning the cultures that the management tries to copy. (2.4) Personal heroism and long hours glorified. This was not a problem during the necessarily chaotic startup phase. It has become a problem because heroism masks the need to address structural deficiencies - heroism should be rare and exceptional not frequent and expected. Engineering morale and talent retention both suffered. There is a cultural drag as the business aims for efficiency and predictability in preparation for IPO. (3) Open source becoming a burden. This topic receives little visible discussion given Cloudera's sincere, thoughtful, and long-standing commitment to open source. There are a number of issues beyond the common open source detractor material in the trade press. (3.1) Misalignment between the open source community and Cloudera's business. Work that will earn committer status is not necessarily work that is highest priority for Cloudera. If engineering career development within Cloudera is solely tied to committer status, and people without that status are considered second-class citizens, it introduces considerable incentive and misalignment issues. (3.2) Engineering overhead and quality. This is an issue already well-felt by customers and well-appreciated by the leadership team. Cloudera's priority should be to deliver a polished product that customers love. A path to committer status is to deliver a major new feature. Polishing the product involves controlling the product surface area, but building new features will expand it. Over time, the open source bias in favor of new features accumulates into huge engineering overheads - merging changes made outside of Cloudera, making different components mutually compatible, bringing external code to high quality. Cloudera engineering should be Cloudera first. There is inherent misalignment if open source committer status is the sole measure of contribution and respect. (3.3) Inherent shortcomings in integration, usability, time to value. Big data use cases are expanding and diversifying. A rational approach is to solve new problems with existing systems, and when necessary, extend or re-architect on some fixed foundation. Open source incentives lead to an arguably irrational outcome: Whenever opportunity arises, develop an entirely new system, even if existing systems can sufficiently though imperfectly solve the problem. Do so because a new system leads to new project PMC and committer rosters, and hence additional opportunities for self advancement. This outcome creates a huge and unnecessary burden for both Cloudera and its customers. Cloudera has to spend an extraordinary amount of effort juggling an out-of-hand product suite (~15 major CDH components and counting, each component with irrationally growing product surface area). Customers spend an extraordinary amount of effort learning the product and getting it to work. The product should be as close to "turn-key" as possible. Customers' efforts should focus on the data analysis itself, and the data tools should become invisible. To paraphrase a Cloudera co-founder - the best minds of my generation are spending time assembling glorified calculators; that sucks. (4) Talent drain, the bad kind. Rank-and-file Clouderans are absolutely amazing. They have moved mountains under extraordinary circumstances to get Cloudera to where it is today. It's one thing if talent leaves positively to forge their own path and burnish Cloudera's external credentials. It's another if talent leaves because of mind-numbing inflexibility in career development or compensation. It's even worse if talent leaves in groups to avoid poisonous apples in middle-management. Cloudera's big data leader position means that no matter where departing talent lands, it lands on potential competitors.

Pros

Huge (potential) market, strong exec leadership in most areas that is trying to put the right things in place. Good pay & benefits overall.

Cons

Unfocused, company is trying to do 100 different things simultaneously; still early market; Hadoop is incredibly difficult for customers; company culture is not for everyone. Bottom line is that selling free software has proven to be very very difficult. Personally I wouldn't do it again (join a company whose business model is based on open source software). There are a few execs who don't reflect or model the company's values, time to show them the door.

Pros

Pros: - The people. The main reason I've stayed over 3 years. - Market opportunity. A lot of growth potential. - Engineering leadership. Overall very good. The head of engineering "gets it"; how to build quality software and not accumulate a bunch of tech debt. - Plenty of interesting challenges. Lots of opportunities to make a big impact.

Cons

The open-source software stack can be chaotic to build an enterprise product out of. On the other hand, plenty of opportunity to be active in Apache communities.

Pros

1. Training (might be a bit less now as they don't want guys leaving to become consultants!) 2. Looks good on your Resume, opens doors to better paying jobs (if you're experienced you can go straight to those jobs however) 3. Free lunches delivered from waiter.com - you don't leave office for $13 ;) 4. Decent wages but good guys earn better elsewhere, which is why they've ended up hiring guys with little or no Hadoop experience now. 5. Still good core engineering on the west cost which are great to work with - smart move would be to poach those developers as the company itself doesn't contain much unique value aside from them - a few of the veterans have moved on already...

Cons

1. Tough market competition, slipping position as Apache Foundation open source catches up thanks to Hortonworks. I was surprised how widespread pro-Hortonworks sentiment was by comparison after I left Cloudera, Cloudera's self serving attitude is driving appetite for Hortonworks. 2. The company attitude has been described as "arrogant" by more than one of my ex-colleagues. 3. Poor hiring - Cloudera are hiring people with no Hadoop experience. Yes you read that right. ZERO HADOOP EXPERIENCE. They don't even get asked Hadoop questions in interview since they have no experience, that's how ridiculous it's become. Lots of ex-Oracle employees in Cloudera now, it's become an old boys club in some parts where friends are hired in through the back door, regardless of them not having any Hadoop or Big Data experience at all. 4. Rank / Titles messed up - newbies have same titles as hardened Hadoop veterans, managers with less experience than their subordinates - you know it's bad when even someone from another department asks you how X got promoted to "manager" with less experience than subordinate Y, must have been drinking the... 5. Kool Aid - "company loyalty" / brand religious culture, partly caused by insecurity in the fast changing marketplace where there's now little market differentiation to warrant such an over-priced (2-3x) semi-proprietary product vs the fully open source HW. Far too much hype. 6. Work life balance - Good luck with that. It's a heavily labor intensive business, one of the reasons Cloudera can't afford all the perks that some other people have mentioned on glassdoor. 7. All Hype - nobody is making money in the big data vendor space even after 5-6 years, nor in any of the related 3rd party products from what I've surveyed, and products are becoming obsoleted year-on-year before they've even been monetized. 8. Complaining that Hortonworks isn't building a sustainable business because they charge less and hoping they fold isn't a great strategy since there is no sign of that happening, if anything they only seem to pick up momentum and improve product in open source under Apache Foundation. What if HW keep going? How will Cloudera manage to compete with virtually the same product but 100% open source and at 1/2 or 1/3 the price? Vendor-lock in with the proprietary Cloudera Manager, Navigator? Most of the experienced users of this space come from open source and don't want proprietary... 9. Lack of Vision and Innovation - they allowed Hortonworks to drive and complete Yarn without interest which has now become the next generation platform - relegating all Hadoop vendors to just commoditized infrastructure, not a premium offering, it's all about Yarn Apps now. Spark also obsoletes Hadoop MapReduce, Databricks invented Spark, so given the 2 most important frameworks in the ecosystem were invented elsewhere it feels like Cloudera has lost it's leadership edge. 10. Fractured culture internally - pro vs anti-Apache Foundation groups, as a result some components not released to Apache, increasingly it feels like Cloudera is not the open source darling it once was, and as it veers away from Apache it loses support. Apache is "just marketing" to Cloudera according to one manager.