Rackspace Technology reviews

* The company is massively indebted to a private equity firm which drives all decision-making, including a hare-brained scattershot approach to layoffs. * Senior "leadership" espouses customer-centric priorities but is actually focused on driving sales even if it means lying to customers about features/services that the company can effectively provide. They also clearly don't care about customers given the fact their February 2019 layoffs included support engineers who were actively troubleshooting customer support requests. * My impression working at Rackspace was that leadership was in name only. I observed widespread employee disengagement, an incompetent manager who would (ironically) disparage his own manager in front of his direct reports, and seemingly random technical decision-making that focused more on engineer preferences than on customer needs. * Job titles mean nothing. There is literally no distinction (implicit or explicit) between engineer I, II, III, IV, V. During my time working at this company I worked closely with "staff" and "principal" engineers who acted more like technically competent junior engineers -- they rarely ventured outside the narrow confines of their own subject matter expertise, did nothing to mentor less experienced engineers, and had no concept whatsoever of how to build consensus within a team. * The company has no standard career growth framework and managers don't seem to understand they are responsible for giving their direct reports the kind of feedback necessary to grow professionally. Working here is more likely to harm your career growth than advance it, unless you are foolish enough to think that promotion == career growth. * While it's nice to be able to work full time remote, the company is pretty tone deaf to the experience of remote employees. For example, the company periodically organizes special events at the HQ in San Antonio and blasts emails about them to the whole company, including remote workers. I'm sorry, but I don't care if y'all are drinking beer and eating free food if I am not going to be included in any way.

Since the last takeover, things are looking down. Bonuses have stopped. Raises are trivial or non-existent. We can't backfill positions due to a hiring freeze that has been in effect for far too long. Since we can't backfill, management won't get rid of bad employees; I guess better a warm body than nothing. Senior people are leaving at a worrisome pace. The vast majority of Rackspace's upper management has been replaced and the new people seem to see us as walking dollar signs and not much else. I could go on, but basically employee perks are being slowly taken away, systems aren't being updated, and the new management is doing their best to make it worse.