Lucid Reviews

Management is very in-grown and young. Most have not had another job since college. The most important thing is to put on a happy face, and not to question. And never criticize. If you have been around the block a few times, this is not the place for you. The attitude is to pretend everything is great all the time, and this leads to a LOT of back room gossip and wasted time in conjecture about how things really are from a business perspective, and failure to face the real problems confronting the company. I saw sales exec after sales exec come in, make a bunch of promises, and management base their projections on these fantasies, and then reality came out short. Operations management has no experience and while in some cases mean well, are learning as they are going, but just keep repeating the same mistakes in evaluating personnel, and lose the best talent. The main technical problem is that the product is a 'nice-to-have', and they are trying to sell to building management professionals who already have heavy investment in their own systems. The champion is often someone in sustainability who cannot necessarily dictate to the Facilities and IT departments the priority to install the Lucid system. The software has virtually no quality control. Lucid uses an extreme form of agile programming, but left out the QA part. This leads to a lot of frustrated customers and an under-appreciated customer service group. Like a lot of companies trying to strike it rich, Lucid is always chasing the next big win instead of really providing a quality product. New features are released half-baked with little or no documentation, and by product managers that have no experience in the industry. There is no career path unless you are one of the teachers' pets, and people are grossly underpaid. In the last year, people were hired from the outside in a huge expansion at high rates and it left no money for raises for the hard working existing team; nor were people promoted from within, except in a very few isolated cases. The attitude is that talented people are privileged to be working for a green company; that is its own reward.

Look elsewhere for sales job, their product is impossible to sell, most companies have no or little justification for fancy energy kiosks - they will spend their money on IT infrastructure well before spending money on a non-critical pretty graphical interface to see when we have to turn off lights. And they have nothing patentable, so there is no barrier of entry for larger companies to emulate what they are doing with broader market appeal. The engineers seem to be the 'B' and 'C' players that could not get on at Google or Apple which always concerned me, I heard from many of them the pay was low for what they did. Super disorganized, management is run by 'kids' with no experience running real companies. You may be hired and fired within months if you say or do the wrong thing. VC money is a problem, they have a massive burn rate and will run out soon. Honestly look elsewhere if looking for a job in Bay Area, the location is also in high crime rate Oakland with dilapidated area, again you can find better paying ops Highly unfocused in their approach to bringing on good people and mentoring them. They have zero patience in providing any help, because they have this year to make it or not. Very 'clicky' groups of people, it feels like you are in high school, if you are over the age of 30 you will feel like a dinosaur.