Elastic Reviews

Pros

1. Amazing People & Managers 2. Flexible work culture & challenging work 3. Great parental leave policy (16 weeks)

Cons

Rewards and recognition could be better.

Advice to Management

Nothing much. Keep this culture forever

Pros

Fantastic people, great leadership, open environment and a product that nearly every company already uses or should be using.

Cons

It's a high growth company and that is challenging to continue to grow at that rate while maintaining a great corporate culture. It only gets harder as the company gets bigger. As an open source company, it's a great part of the culture, but also includes the challenges of competing with "free software", particularly when cloud service providers host it without contributing back.

Pros

- Excellent benefits - Distributed work arrangement - Opportunity to travel - Challenging work - Product is good - Broader community is awesome to work with

Cons

- Ineffective middle-management. It's apparent that something went wrong with hiring in the past year or so - we hired too aggressively to fill middle management positions and the result is a ton of poor-fit candidates. They seem experienced on paper but a lot of them do not have clear vision and cannot articulate coherent strategies to drive business. It is chaotic on the ground as it can feel sometimes that no one knows what they are doing. There is also decreasing morale when the juniors are catching on to the cluelessness of these new middle-managers. There is also cascading push of responsibility and blame between these middle-managers which make it hard for teams to truly work together. - Hard to have your voice heard nowadays. A lot of preaching on transparency, but when feedback is given, no actions are taken (even after months-years), even when given by a huge number of people and even when startlingly negative. The company seems content with letting certain things slide, as long as things look good in the short-term.

Advice to Management

Take a good look at your middle-managers, who is actually doing work and who is only "delegating" tasks without added value? And make adjustments quick... We still truly believe in Shay and ELT's vision, but you need to make sure the middle layer of managers are as good as the top as the company grows.

Pros

Health & Benefits are great, Flexible Schedule ELK Stack is a very well known tech in the market Elastic cares and community support is fun

Cons

I preface this list by saying I work in sales, and although some of the items may apply to others, I am writing this from the perspective of a remote field rep. YMMV in other roles. Company politics are plentiful. Over last few years have seen many people fired, promoted, and hired seemingly by who likes or dislikes them. Management takes feedback personally, and will openly criticize/berate you for voicing independent ideas. Working remotely might be a pro, but it means your boss will expect you to answer at all hours of the day/night. I constantly get activity-related questions of what and when I am doing with my time, but management does not have any recommendations on KPIs that lead to more closed business. Also, the folks who do work in the offices will be treated more favorably as they develop relationships and work much closer to management. Contracts, Legal, Comp, Sales Ops, and others are openly hostile to sales. If/when I've asked questions on processes or sought approvals I've received mostly passive-aggressive directions to look for answers in the internal wiki. I have heard this complaint voiced by others on my team. It seems to me, that many in nonsales roles resent having salespeople around. Free, Free, Free. Elastic gives nearly every feature away for free. Not that selling on features is best... BUT when you are working a bottom-up (engineer focus) strategy and have mega competitors in every category, it would be nice to have a more defendable price point. Customers receive million$ in value from our freeware paying $0 in return. Most of the sales leaders are promoted from within and are more bosses than leaders. They seem to have no shortage of time when it comes to harassing reps on forecast updates, but have little to offer in terms of strategy, coaching, mentoring, prospecting, etc. The new quotas are very high in relation to deal size. The reps who are hitting their #'s are doing so through a few very large (10x sized) deals which blow out their numbers. The rest of the reps are struggling to even hit OTE. Year over year should not see decreased earnings. SJW & Overwhelming nonrelevant communication on company channels. Slack/Email/Chatter is full of COMPANY WIDE baby announcements, team updates, product sightings, arguments, gender pronoun conversations, personal stores of love for elastic, celebrations from different teams, etc. etc.. to the point where it is tough to keep track of what is relevant to your job. I have stopped even looking at emails except for customers & folks I know, as there isn't enough time to follow all the company "reply all" and slack channel conversations on irrelevant topics. ** depending on your disposition this may be a plus, but it is hurting our productivity. Elastic is not focused on sales (rem this is sales review you might be ok with this). - Services sell packages that are very expensive considering the lack of PM or SOW. The rate per hour (price/hours in the package) typically are much higher than other PS orgs. - Pricing is supposed to be disruptive but is often confusing to the market as different offerings are priced differently (node, instance, enterprise units) and features are not standardized across deployments. - Lackluster partner enablement, no onboarding program, no joint marketing, no partner boot camps, joint selling motions are confusing and lack enough incentive.

Advice to Management

Create a true SaaS experience by forgetting about the sizing and nodes that need to be deployed and focus on charging by use case or consumption-based pricing. Work on building up a true sales process that includes ICP, buyers journey, objection/competition handling and a step by step process from interest to close. Stop creating yes men/women in the management team and encourage new ideas focused on execution. Sales are ethical, the better we do as a company the more lives who work at the company and are supported by the company are impacted. It is ok and ethical to be an aggressive sales organization. Time to take the gloves off fight our competitors and hold our customers accountable for the value they receive from us.

Pros

- Great team and management striving to become #1 in all use cases - Best recruitment experience - fastest and to the point - Humble mindset. - Huge market to go after with a best of breed tech foundation - If you like to work with happy customers who are willing to learn and handwalked, this is the place to be. Most fun sales job I have worked at. - Quantity, quality, enthusiasm and loyalty of our customer base - We drive business change in all levels at some of the best companies in the world - Ability to work in multiple use cases that allows to expand your career. APM, Data, Security etc - Great office in the middle of Amsterdam - Free healthy buffet lunch

Cons

- Complex technology that requires significant amount of understand to properly position. So either have the background or willingness to learn! - Immense growth, culture might be an issue however I do have confidence in the management. They are to the point and not cutting corners.

Advice to Management

- Keep focused on development and continue to only recruit the best of the best! - Pay attention to growth of employees with the growth of company.

Pros

flexible and very young. Eager to grow and that's giving a great energy within this company. People including management helpful to guide you or have conversations around career progression. Very international feeling and one of the first companies I ever worked for with such a great Diversity mix. Not only that also inclusion is something I experience every day. It's an organisation that believes every individual is part of the success of the company.

Cons

Till now I have not experienced any cons.

Pros

Just started as a User Success Manager at Elastic. Landing so far has been nothing but great, awesome colleagues, amazing office (including lunch), loads of learning opportunities and growth opportunities. Would recommend it to anyone!

Cons

Might be a bit overwhelming to have so much content and new people coming at you so quickly. Not a negative point but be prepared that the people at Elastic don't only play hard, working hard is (obviously) a big part of the company!

Advice to Management

Amsterdam office to become Rotterdam office!

Pros

- Remote working - Catered lunches - Volunteer time off - Great product - Great beliefs

Cons

- Lousy management; some managers just do not have the capacity to be a manager. they just fear upper management and that cascades down onto you because of their mismanagement, hence the problem become yours, not because they set you up for failure. - Political - you always have to be brown nosing. - Favouritism - Don't walk the talk.

Advice to Management

Look into your mid-high management and ask yourself if these are actually good managers or leaders. Most of the time, they're not. they're just there to pretend they are just so they look good in front of the ELT team. I find that a lot of times, they work super hard but the results are meagre. They talk about their bottom up strategy, which is great and engaging but sometimes you also need to look at a bit of expansion instead of always from your consistent pool. Most of the managers there just use their loud voice because they think that works. As usual with most tech firms - the loudest voice wins even though they may not necessarily be the best voice of reason.