Is It a Good Time to Join Pure Storage?
Recently I received positive feedback from Pure Storage and will probably receive a SWE offer next week. The team is under the FlashBlade BU, working on some distributed storage system. It seems to be the best choice for me at the moment, but I definitely need more input on this since I still don't know much about the company and the industry as a whole. The factors I consider (assessed with slightly different priorities) WLB/Culture > Job Security = TC > Career Development WLB/Culture: Pure Storage has a medium rating on Blind (Total: 3.9, WLB: 4.0), which is acceptable Job Security: Pure Storage's business seems to perform well this year with bullish financials and stock price (compared to the entire tech sector). Haven't researched the layoff history, but the headcount growth seems to be reasonable (28% over the past 2 years). TC: Although still haven't got any TC number from the recruiter yet, Pure Storage's TC seems to be decent. Have seen several MTS 3 offers with 260K TC (band top could be close to 300K). Career Development: My current job is FinTech product backend, but I'm excited about trying something different (e.g. infra/system software). I'm not familiar with the "storage system" domain and not sure about its prospect. But I guess the projects will be technically more challenging, which will enhance my competency as a software engineer. My Doubts and Concerns: 1. Company Long-Term Outlook: Pure Storage seems to be quite solid in the short term, thanks to the industry's resilience, the downtrend of the SSD price. It has just become profitable this year. But as an outsider, I'm not sure if this bullish trend is sustainable. Is it a secure place to stay in the next 2 years? The data storage industry is also quite competitive with probably smaller upside. The company’s products seem to be used mostly in on-premise data centers and private clouds. Not sure if it can survive the competition against the public cloud providers. 2. Career Prospects: Is it a good idea to switch to the "storage system" domain? Would this experience help me land some great opportunities in the future? My other potential choices: Walmart Global Tech (Ads Tech): Initial verbal offer of SWE 3 with a 210K TC, then upgraded to SWE 4 (haven't got the new TC number yet) ByteDance: Leveled as 2-1. But there's still some uncertainty with the offer, because the recruiter said they still need some time to reevaluate the headcount. Plaid: Got approval from the hiring committee, but there's no available headcount now. (No estimated time for new headcount) Rubrik: Still in team matching stage 3YOE TC: 185K #tech #purestorage
1. Company outlook: long term outlook looks better than short term. Flash prices per TB are still relatively high compared to spinning disks. And spinning’s disks are still a huge market. It’s projected that flash will be on par with disks in ~7 years. As to competition, yes, it’s quite competitive market. We have netapp and dell emc as the main competitors (and few smaller ones). You can clearly see by revenue growth of each company that Pure is taking market share from competitors. 2. Career Prospects: I don’t know if “storage domain” will help you to land great opportunities in the future but you’ll definitely grow as an engineer working on Flashblade. It’s a highly parallel system with complex architecture. The design decision you would need to take are not trivial and in some areas you would need quite good understanding of concurrent data structures and algorithms.
Thank you so much for the detailed reply. It helps me a lot to understand the industry trend.
OP, do you mind sharing how long did Walmart take to provide feedback on the interviews? And how much did they offer for SWE3?
Feedback was really quick, within one week after the interviews. As I mentioned, TC for level 3 was 210K.
Cool, thanks!
Walmart location?
Sunnyvale, CA