VTEX Reviews

Hello, first of all, thank you for the feedback. As bad as it can get, feedbacks always put us in a reflexive perspective of our actions and the result is always good. My name is Geraldo, I co-founded VTEX with Mariano, and I am sure that we are not perfect roles, we have our flaws, our bad times, our lack of maturity. But I do feel that you are seeing everything with a gray glass. I will not elaborate into the comments that are more intagible, but I feel that I can try to clarify your perception about the servers and the customer centric issues.. We have this Demo Friday event that is a meeting for technical people talk about technical challenges, technical achievements that we had on the previous week. Actually, this meeting is one step into making our company more open, more transparent and more engaging. Slack is another initiative on this path, our status page, the TVs that you complained are some other examples. There are a lot of good things that we feel we will accomplish by doing this. But also, there are trade-offs. One of these trade-offs is your perception, for example. Most of the regular companies that most of us worked, they simply hide all the problems from the non-management people. All meetings are commemoration, achievements, happiness. The only time that you hear the reality is during the feedback meetings, once a year. Some people refer this as McDonalds culture: the typical McDonalds employee, he doesn't know nothing about the company. The only news that he gets is when he turn-out to be the employee of the month. You might agree with me that this McDonalds strategy is good in some way, but puts the employee in a passive atitude against anything that happens in the company. He doesn't care. It might work in the fast-food industry, but it will never work in a high tech, fast moving company. We decided to go to the opposite way of McDonalds. We are creating a more transparent company where people are allowed to see more of what is happening, including the difficult moments. We expect the people that work with us to act as adults, in a way that they can handle difficult moments, frustation of the company goals, etc.. I will make some comments about your recent perception over the effort that we are making to make our hosting costs more efficient. As you might know, since a year ago, the hosting cost of any company that uses cloud have more than doubled ( taxes and exchange rate are rising). Because we are extremely customer centric and care about our customer, we are doing our best to prevent having to charge more from our customers because of that. We could. This moment is the typical moment that there is a economic unbalance of our contract, we could claim that. We are taking all kinds of measures to hold this cost, most of them you might remember from the meetings: no server should spend less than 20% CPU, no test machine should use our production instance type, no environment can sleep overnight without load, etc.. Since you might not be a technical guy and also you might be very upset with us from other subjects, you thought that this measures were bad for the uptime of our system. They are not, trust me; ask any technical guy you know and he will tell. We did had a crisis in July, and I assure you that this is not related to our cost campaign. The explanation for this crisis is in our blog, under the title Esclarecimento sobre as Últimas Instabilidades. By the way, we are increasing a lot the ways that we share information with our customers, mostly when things are not working as it should. Although you didn't mention, as you might have seen on Demo Friday, we are investing heavily on a lot of new versions of a lot of modules that we have. This, in my point of view, is to care a lot about our customers. I see that you described yourself as a Current Employee. Although you mentioned so many bad opinions about the company, since you are still working with us, it means that there are more things that you like about the company than the things that you don't like. Maybe something happened that hurt you and you are upset. I encourage you to look for me in private, so that we can talk about what is upsetting you and stop the bad feeling, that I am sure hurts more you than everybody else. I promise that I will do my best to make things work. Thanks again,