Lucidworks reviews

- Some company values are hollow "Honor People" is a core value, yet I witnessed multiple employees laid off without warning and within minutes of scheduled prospect calls, leaving coworkers in a lurch. "Break the Bottle" is a value, but often the push to "innovate" as the value indicates is the only real solution to meet customer requirements. There simply isn't enough that can be implemented on a repetitive basis. - Company culture is toxic The leadership has allowed politics and other social/cultural issues to permeate the company: from the CEO, from the CRO, in Slack channels, in company-wide "Basecamp" meetings ... it's insufferable. At times I felt I was in the middle of a propaganda exercise. - Top-level leadership is erratic and too often full of platitudes The company vision from the CEO seemed to change every 6 months or so. Much of it was rah-rah Powerpoint stuff that sounds great but indicates that the CEO is probably not the right guy to get the company to the next level, which is something I've seen before. Granted, COVID19 presented all businesses with challenges, but this company constantly tells the sales team that the next iteration of the product or new features are coming but "you can't sell it yet". It feels like a ship lost at sea with a few lights on the horizon from time to time. - Engineering focus is too strong, insufficient sales focus The visionary slant in the technology is fun and challenging, but it overwhelms the importance of sales and revenue. Over time I saw the company become more engineering-driven vs. sales-driven, and in sales, that's a terrible place to be. - Documentation maturity moves at a snail's pace There is such a lack of detail and examples for most of the documentation that you will play a trial-and-error game or go on a Slack adventure trying to find information that helps you use the product. In 3 years the improvement was so minimal that I finally gave up trying to help. - Processes for new tech are immature and field personnel suffer Pre-sales people are expected to sell entire features that are only supported by one unlucky engineering or support person, with no formal strategy or method to implement. This leads to a lot of guesswork, tons of mistakes, and lost time spent just trying to get something working. Highly immature product process. - Product is tedious and laborious for application creation The product is actually very cool in its characteristic of being a toolbox where you can build just about anything, but it takes a TON of work just to realize most of the benefit of what is advertised. Often, SEs spend many extra hours and weekends preparing POCs that should be repeatable, at least partially. Too much labor is involved to get a search-based app delivered, hence the massive SOWs created by the Professional Services organization. Lucidworks sells EVERYTHING with services hours because they know that very few customers can implement on their own or with minimal support.