Brilliant engineers, worst leadership in the Bay Area - Engineering Manager Cloudflare Employee Review

1.0
Jul 18, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The brightest engineers, full stop.

Cons

The CEO is a petty narcissist, that freaks out whenever there is an incident, and shows zero trust in his team. It’s been a known problem for years. No one does anything about it, because they are afraid of him, which is strange, because he’s not a particularly charismatic or intimidating person. Leadership openly asks managers to write positive Glassdoor reviews, and responds to negative reviews by suggesting employees take it up with their manager. Unfortunately, there is a culture of managers not listening to employees, so nothing changes. CEO is obsessed with creating an “office culture”, but can’t seem to describe to anyone what that means. Leadership loves to toss around the “seat on the rocket ship” analogy, but blatantly ignores the fact that rocket ship level engineering requires rigor, deliberation, transparency, and often, moving slower to make sure the right engineering is being done. The company lurches from one incident to another, never really learning from mistakes, yet is obsessed with growing quickly. Disaster in the making, and the best employees are leaving right and left.

Explore other reviews about Cloudflare

5.0
May 1, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Very good culture and strong talent

Cons

Expectation to manage up and extremely fast paced environment

2.0
Jun 12, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Strong platform - Mostly friendly and smart people - Good salary, but substandard benefits

Cons

- Strong culture of favoritism: if you’re not an OG or coming in from Palo Alto, you’ll face an uphill battle in sales. - Sales culture is terribly toxic, political, and cliquey, especially with the Palo Alto Networks invasion. - Ridiculous internal processes and poorly designed tools (still use more spreadsheets than tools, quotes can take weeks and I’m not kidding) - Zero sales tools (No Outreach, Gong, good luck even getting Zoom Info) - Substandard BDR team with 12:1 ratios of BDR to AE. Got zero set meetings in over 1 year with our team’s BDR.

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