Cult Culture Combustion - Anonymous employee Appian Employee Review

Thank you for your positive comments approving of our CEO, our good people and great potential. I do need to correct a few misstatements. We don’t trick people into working long hours with piles of food, office perks and mandatory fun. Everything about Appian – including our headquarters surrounded by restaurants and entertainment you can walk to – is designed for openness. We want you to enrich our culture with your interests and relationships outside Appian. That’s our strength. We should hire more recent college graduates, not less. Most people who join Appian stay five years or more, turnover remains low, so the real culture threat is forgetting what made this company great – being open to new ideas, new energy, and valuing potential and personality over past experience in hiring decisions. We don’t want to be Google or anybody else. We are happy being Appian. The business is quite strong and growing quickly and Appian customer satisfaction is the highest in our market segment. Don’t take my word for it -- just check the independent ratings from Gartner Research published last week. Every idea is heard and considered, but good strategy dictates making hard choices about which ideas can be executed well. If you have worked with Appian’s CEO, you would know Matt’s voice is never raised to drown out other’s opinions. Appian's Women’s Leadership Program (WLP) is a self-organized group led by high-performing women that have help us build and sustain a meritocratic culture at Appian that empowers, not silences diverse viewpoints. WLP helps Appian network with leading lights outside our company to measure and improve ourselves. As for Appian Engineers, most develop with Facebook React.js and Java – great tools and in very high demand. I believe you are referring to Appian’s use of Kx. Kx is an innovative NoSQL technology used for Big Data and high-performance analytics that is also used by some of the biggest financial services organizations in the world. In case you had not heard, experience working with a Big Data platform like Kx is an extremely valuable and marketable skillset. Right now, only a few engineers get to work with Kx inside Appian. For candidates considering a career with us, please feel free to bring up any points raised in this post with your interviewers. We look forward to showing you the real Appian. -Michael, Co-founder & CTO, Appian