Databricks reviews

Like any tech company, work/life balance can be difficult at times.

I am on a customer-facing team. As the company has grown from the 200-300 size 3 yrs ago to the current 1400+, we've added multiple layers of middle management. Many of these middle managers are from other companies of questionable success. When we do this, we risk bringing the culture and practices of these companies into our doors... And in positions of management, the culture effects are amplified. Every year, our practices and culture shifts (growing pains) and we add more red-tape. Growth is great, but within the customer-facing teams we promoted some ICs to first-time manager roles, added layers of reporting requirements on teams, and imported a ton of managers from outside. There has been more toxicity coming from the Sales team lately; if people in Sales have a complaint about your work they might just throw you under a bus instead of working it out with you. One sales rep told me a lot of reps are frustrated with the recent flood of Splunk alumni into our ranks. We hired some Splunk leaders a while back, and they brought in Splunkers by the busload. Some of the leaders are so-so. Some managers also don't protect their directs. They'll judge their directs based on feedback from folks from other teams, and won't defend the actions of their direct or bother investigating for context and jump to conclusions. Ben Howoritz (one of our investors) says many companies struggle to translate stated cultural values into actual practice. Old Databricks used to have great alignment on culture throughout the company, but New Databricks seems to be struggling with it. We also just got our internal culture survey results back and our work/life balance score and compensation scores were low across much of the company. Within my team I've heard a lot of folks complain about micromanagement and general overwork. There is a lot more discontent amongst the teams than it seems on the outside.