Nimble Storage Reviews

Pros

Excellent learning opportunities and scope

Cons

No growth path or career plan

Pros

Great people and leadership, people always willing to assist

Cons

Product Market Fit & further adoption of cloud based technology away from on-premise.

Pros

There are great people in every area of the company, from engineering to sales to operations. Friendly helpful people that are highly skilled. There is a great sense of focus and determination to be the best in the business. The sales culture is especially good - no jerks here, very little of the typical political battles and personality conflicts.

Cons

Storage is a tough market. The competition is incredibly fierce. You get the sense that the competition is outspending Nimble dramatically on marketing. It becomes harder and harder to stand out from a technical perspective. Heck, we were told to shy away from getting into the technical details (weeds) because every vendor now sounds the same on paper. InfoSight is a key differentiator but it does NOT resonate with every customer. The total compensation package was severely diminished when the stock fell in Q3 of 2015. There was no real mechanism in place to fix that for existing employees... although employees that joined after the stock fell might have had it better.

Pros

The company, product, working environment & colleagues are what makes a "great place to work". Nimble ranks at #1 on that list for me (and i've worked at quite a few startups & large vendors to compare with!). The product rocks and is truly ready for the Enterprise, although the company does have a habit of underselling itself in the market amongst other new-age vendors - due to trying to build a sustainable global brand rather than in-your-face marketing or fabricating truths to try and convince a customer to buy. Nimble has eradicated the yearly employee review charade as it's not a worthwhile process to go through, valuing a constant feedback & reward process instead. This has been a breath of fresh air for employees. Also the added strap line of "hiring no jerks" absolutely rings true from the CEO all the way down to local management. The company always values your input and recognises outstanding achievement. Career growth is also highly possible here, with a lot of recent promotions occurring throughout the global sales team.

Cons

The company is constantly running at 6th gear, and is growing fast. And I mean FAST. This might not be the best place for you if you want to coast or disappear to play golf a couple of days a week. Sometimes it's impossible to look past the 10-12 hour working days to find the weekend. But that what happens when taking a company from hottest & fastest growing startup to the next Tier 1 enterprise storage vendor.

Pros

Excellent benefits package and generous equity package. Fair and charitable PTO policy, focused on wellness and family. The culture of camaraderie and charity is strong, as well as an outstanding work ethic across all the teams. I'm constantly impressed by the level of customer focus among our customer support, engineering, training, executives and operations team. Definitely a blue collar work ethic, where no one is above "emptying their trashcan". As a systems engineer, I enjoy selling the product because it's easy to use, performs better than the competition, and delivers scale reliably. The development / engineering staff is focused on delivering quality software, not just kicking out features that barely work. I have spent time with Varun, Umesh and Suresh in front of customers. All three of them are excellent speakers, and incredibly focused on building the next great storage company. I enjoy working for them.

Cons

We're not a huge company (that's a pro for me, may be a con for you) with a large development / integration staff. Our customers and prospects are asking for features or application integration that we haven't delivered yet, and won't deliver for 6 months to a year, or longer. This is a challenge for the sales teams.

Pros

- Fun, Smart, Positive employee base - Product is on fire and will only continue to grow with introduction of FC - CEO and Founders are visionary and A players

Cons

- Becoming NetApp 2.0....will hire literally anyone and everyone from Netapp - Management is ineffective, inexperienced, and unable to provide career progression. - a lot of lip service in regards to new roles and growth, with no actions to back them - Company has a mind set they are a huge enterprise organization....news flash they're not yet. - Pay is low, no standard of living raises, offer RSUs with year long vest schedules (essentially do there best to make employees stay by offering more stock in exchange for no raises or promotions) - Managers do not want anyone to ask questions or make waves, do so at the risk of being looked at as a martyr - Company was great Pre-IPO, now it has a zero fun policy, and with no pre-ipo stock incentive there is no reason to be there. - working from home is forbidden and micro-managing is over the top - senior leaders tell you they are committed to the company and believe in it, which sounds great and all, but a quick google news search shows constant dumping/selling of there stock.

Pros

Nice Area - Silicon Valley, brand-new building, lots of free junk food (a pro for some). If you are okay with/like to brown-nose and are good at it (I do not mean this in a demeaning way, it's simply how some people operate) it could be a good fit.

Cons

Almost everything else falls into this category.Culture started off decently, but it's rapidly gone down hill. There's an absurd amount of favoritism at this company; hard/intelligent work seems to go unnoticed/unappreciated across the majority of teams, however brown-nosing seems to go a very long ways. Senior management tend to hire/promote their friends, which results in a bunch of people (some in high places) that know absolutely nothing about what they are overseeing/talking about, which brings a lot of distress to those who put their all into their jobs. Management (even mid-level) here is extremely high-level, and tends not to provide any guidance or even general availability which makes this is a terrible place for someone who is interested in career/skill development (and in many cases - simply finishing a task). My "Business Outlook" rating is based solely on how well I think the company will push their product, in terms of culture/work environment, I am almost certain it will get worse.

Pros

People: Despite massive growth (over 500 employees now!) Nimble has managed to maintain incredibly high standards, and has hired very talented people who are ridiculously good at their jobs, but still fit in with the culture. Hiring managers tout the "no jerks" policy and really stand by it. I firmly believe in healthy competition, and working alongside the best motivates me to raise my game, so I get better every day. Technology: The CASL file system that the founders built is truly game changing. It's not the sexiest consumer product, or even the easiest enterprise storage product to market because it's true differentiations are subtle and don't fit on a t-shirt. But it is a game-changer for the customers that buy it, and every one of the customers I've spoken with are fanatical about how much they love the technology and the support. Career advancement: Fastest growing company in a $25B market, this is a true meritocracy where even the C suite notices when you perform, the company has at least doubled revenue every year since launch, and has filed for an IPO. You do the math, the sky is the limit!

Cons

Only the typical growing pains of a hyper growth company - we've outgrown two offices in two years. And a caution for the faint of heart: the company does not suffer fools gladly - if you are not capable of contributing and keeping up with a very aggressive pace, there is no where to hide.

Pros

Anyone who has worked in IT, especially a Lab environment, knows that it can be stressful and often thankless. Not here. I have been here over 2 years and loving every minute. I can't say enough good things. It is fast paced and a lot of work but I haven't had this much fun in my 11 year career. The pay is exceptional, the work-life balance is stellar and there are smart people everywhere willing to help you learn and grow. They are constantly feeding you or taking you places to celebrate new milestones, we are adding new customer accounts at a break-neck pace, the Senior Management is easily accessible, and the product practically sells itself. It's a very exciting time to be here. They are going to have to push me out the door before I look anywhere else for employment. GREAT PLACE TO WORK.

Cons

The only downside I can think of is sometimes we are moving so quick that some of the nuanced details get lost in the shuffle. It eventually gets ironed out, but early assumptions in a project often lead to last minute fire drills on that project.

Pros

Nimble dusted off a 20 year old file system architecture and figured out a way to make it fast using commodity hardware. They are still getting meetings with customers because they still have that new car smell to their product. What's next to drive the stock back up for investors since going IPO?

Cons

They don't have integrated NAS, just added fiber channel in it's 4th year of shipping product. The product is a one trick pony despite Nimble's claim that it can do everything for your data storage in one appliance. Unless they come up with the next big iteration of this one trick appliance, stock holders will start asking questions. The problem is that the majority of stock holders are the employees through their aggressive RSU hiring campaign. It's like the fox guarding the hen house. This combined with a company culture with delusions of grandeur, and the hypocrisy of the no jerks policy makes this a bad company to be at when things start getting tough. And if you aren't tight with the management team because you worked with them at NetApp, or if you question management, you won't survive.