Rackspace Technology reviews

I would say the two biggest downsides of Rackspace are: 1) The upsides are shrinking. As the company has grown the beautiful and unique culture that makes Rackspace so great has diminished considerably. This is largely due to poor hiring choices in leadership which has been extremely impactful in a negative way on the company even after some of these poor choices are dealt with my letting those leaders go. In some particular groups leaders that were fired over 3 years ago still have a lasting negative impact on how things are done because new leaders brought into to replace them did not effectively identify the things which their predecessor did wrong and fix all of them. In many ways this is a failure of middle management that's caused because of the tendency for new leaders to bring in a cadre of cronies that follow them from whatever corporate husk they left, and if the leader gets fired, the cronies stay making it that much more difficult for a new leader to effectively resolve the things that didn't work. 2) The general level of compensation is well below market rate for a technology firm. It's pretty much always been this way, but most Rackers were okay with this in return for getting to be involved in such a wonderful culture and company and getting relatively unrestricted access to company resources to engage their minds on whatever it was at the moment they wanted to learn about. As the company has grown though the culture has dwindled and with it more restrictive policies have been created which prevent employees from being fully mentally engaged in the curiosities that drive them. It's led to a situation where many of the bright talented people I interact with come to work every day not sure exactly what they should even be doing because they don't solve problems by mandate, they solve problems by discovery. A company where it was once acceptable to have beer during meetings as long as you weren't drunk at you desk and where every employee had significant access to technology resources to try new things just to see if they'll work is what lead to the creation of many of the innovative technical concepts and methods of achieving them that exist today. Instead we've replaced that with company policies that won't even let me stream a documentary from Netflix on a separate monitor while I'm pulling an overnight shift in operations effectively monitoring systems which are highly automated in case an immediate response is necessary. This lack of compensation and this failure of culture has lead to a massive brain drain as the vast majority of long-time old school Rackers are bailing on the company. Anyone who is a strong technical talent is in high demand in the market, especially the likes of those who helped drive the beginnings of Cloud computing. Failure to compensate these people properly while demanding that they comply to asinine policies is a guaranteed way to lose them and with it lose the company's ability to execute effectively.

Rackspace used to be an exciting company to work for but since the it got acquired and went private it has gone down hill. Human Resources has Managers create fake positive company reviews on Glassdoor and those Managers will ask their teams to do the same thing so they can sugar coat the work environment. You will see many 5 star reviews after each layoff. Speaking of layoffs, they happen every year which pushes out senior employees so they can bring in new talent at a lower pay. The company operates in silos. Each team follows their own process which creates inconsistent ways of working. Career advancement is not judged by performance it's more about how well you get along with your Manager. And if you have issues with your Manager and tell HR about it, it will come back and haunt you.