1. Promotion of weekend work: The company promotes a culture where employees are expected to work on weekends, which can lead to burnout and work-life imbalance. 2. Favoritism and promotion based on flattery: Management practices favoritism, with promotions and hikes going to those who butter up architects and managers. This undermines a fair and merit-based system, leading to resentment among employees. 3. Excessive micromanagement: Architects and technical directors engage in excessive micromanagement, even scrutinizing trivial aspects like variable names in merge requests. This level of control stifles creativity and autonomy, demoralizing the team. 4. Puppet management: The manager and technical director act as puppets of a toxic architect. This individual exhibits rude behavior, insults team members during standups, and creates a hostile work environment. Despite awareness of this toxic behavior, the CTO and others in authority fail to address the issue. 5. High turnover rate: The toxic work culture and micromanagement have resulted in a significant number of employees leaving the company within a short period. More than half of the team members have departed in the past two years due to these issues. 6. Unrealistic deadlines and pressure from higher management: The VP of engineering imposes unrealistic and aggressive deadlines, putting additional stress on the team. This creates an environment of constant pressure and anxiety, negatively impacting employee morale. 7. Unclear role of the program manager: The program manager's role remains ambiguous to employees. Their contributions seem limited to making random comments on Jira tickets and asking for completion dates, suggesting a lack of meaningful involvement or impact. 8. Control-oriented architect: The architect exercises excessive control over all aspects of the team's work. From code changes to high-level design, employees are required to seek their review and approval. Disagreements or questions are met with anger and tantrums, stifling healthy collaboration and professional growth. 9. Harassment and forced attrition: The toxic architect feels threatened by experienced team members and harasses them until they either leave the team or the company. This behavior creates a hostile and insecure work environment, driving away valuable talent. 10. Decent work compensated by a toxic environment: Some justify the toxic architect's behavior by citing the profits they generate for the company. However, this comes at the cost of employees' well-being, job satisfaction, and fair treatment. The work may be decent, but the toxic work culture overshadows any positives. 11. Unfairness in hackathon judging: During a hackathon event, the toxic architect's favorite employee participated. Surprisingly, the architect himself was one of the judges. Instead of maintaining impartiality, the architect exclusively provided the idea to his favored employee. Later, during the prototype judging phase, the architect, as a judge, took it upon himself to explain the project and idea to the other judge when the favored employee struggled to do so. Consequently, the favored employee ended up winning the hackathon. Even the employee openly admitted that they didn't deserve to win. This incident showcased a clear case of injustice, as other participants who worked tirelessly overnight to implement their ideas were undermined, and the winner was predetermined.This incident further highlights the toxic work culture and favoritism that permeates throughout the company, eroding trust and fairness among employees. In summary, Druva Company's work culture is toxic, characterized by weekend work promotion, favoritism, micromanagement, puppet management, turnover, unrealistic deadlines, an unclear role for the program manager, control-oriented architecture, harassment, and the sacrifice of employee well-being for short-term gains. If you value a healthy work environment, work-life balance, and fair treatment, this company may not be suitable for you. 12. Lack of employee-centric approach: The company demonstrates a clear lack of focus on employee well-being and satisfaction. In March 2023, they laid off 5 percent of their workforce, citing poor market performance. Additionally, they canceled the yearly salary increments scheduled for May, attributing it to the company's supposed struggles. Furthermore, during the bonus payout in May, employees were only given 65% of their expected bonus, with the company justifying this decision by claiming a shaky financial year. Interestingly, in a June All-hands meeting, one of the cofounders boasted about maintaining a good year-over-year profit. 13.Aggressive migration to a new storage architecture: The company is attempting to transition from an old storage architecture to a new one that they have developed over the past two years. The co-founder is pushing for the migration of all customers to the new architecture and pressuring management to add more features to facilitate the migration process. However, the new architecture currently lacks many features, which has hindered the successful migration of existing customers. The primary motivation behind the co-founder's urgency to migrate is that the old architecture has a bug causing backup and restore failures. Unfortunately, the employees responsible for resolving the issue have left the company. The co-founder is concerned that if more customers encounter the same bug, they may threaten to leave the product. This was evident during an escalation call where the customer expressed a desire to terminate their use of the product. In this situation, the co-founder had to plead with the customer to continue their partnership. 14. Absence of a team manager: The team responsible for building the new architecture, which has the potential to generate significant profits for the company, has been functioning without a manager for over a year. This is primarily due to the toxic work environment and internal disarray that no one wants to endure. Two individuals were appointed as managers one after another, but both left the company within one week of joining after witnessing the culture and internal chaos. Druva Company has a toxic work culture with weekend work promotion, favoritism, micromanagement, and a hostile architect. High turnover, unrealistic deadlines, unclear roles, and employee mistreatment further contribute to the toxic environment. The company lacks employee-centric policies, exhibits unfairness in promotions and compensation, and struggles with the transition to a new architecture. The absence of a manager and pervasive gossip hinder progress. Overall, it is an unfavorable workplace with detrimental effects on morale and productivity. #tech #layoffs #druva
I can attest to all these points. Druva is not the company to work for.
I will present concrete instances that validate the above points in timely manner.
1. Promotion of weekend work has become a common practice within the team. Some employees consistently work long hours, including weekends, enabling them to complete their assigned tasks quickly. However, those who do not work excessive hours often face scrutiny during meetings for taking longer to finish their work. This discrepancy in working hours sets an implicit benchmark, making it difficult for others to meet expectations. Interestingly, those who overwork are not fond of doing so, but they are deliberately assigned additional tasks with tight deadlines, leaving them with no choice but to put in extra hours. Consequently, this creates an imbalance in the workload distribution among team members. Furthermore, the team lacks recognition for good performance, while any mistakes or bugs resulting from code changes are met with scolding. An illustrative incident occurred when one individual was asked about the deadline for a task on Monday. Initially, they estimated being able to complete it by the following Monday or Tuesday. However, the toxic architect personally messaged them, suggesting they could finish it by Thursday. This left the employee with no option but to overwork and deliver the task by Thursday. Such instances regularly occur, putting pressure on individuals to expedite their work. Additionally, there have been numerous occasions where team members receive code review comments from the architect on Friday evenings, with the expectation of merging their code by Monday morning. This indirectly encourages weekend work. People are continuously subjected to this demanding and relentless work environment, impacting the team's dynamics day in and day out.
9. Harassment and forced attrition: This new storage architecture team had two architects (let's call them S and P, respectively) since its inception, and both were heading two different services within it. However, six to seven months ago, when they were working on the cloud cache feature, the S architect's service had the majority of the work, while P's architect service had relatively less work. On one fine day, when P was on leave, one of P's team members gave a suggestion regarding the design aspect to the S architect in a meeting. This really agitated the S architect, and he immediately called the P architect and lashed out at him, saying (next text is paraphrased), "You are just a consultant in this project, so just act like one" and said very harsh things to him. The S architect's point of view was that the person who gave the design suggestion didn't have context, and he could have just ignored the suggestion. Yet, the S architect lashed out at the senior member of the team (P architect) when he was on vacation. After this event, the P architect disassociated himself from that team and started focusing only on the other teams he was heading. The official reason the architect gave was that he can't handle the team, citing health reasons. OF COURSE. Eventually, the company had to hire a new architect to replace P architect. Now, this Distinguished Engineer (S architect) cannot respect his fellow senior colleague, who is the Senior Technical Director (P architect), as he casually lashed out. Also, this is not an isolated incident. The software engineers (junior, staff, senior staff) and principal engineers get the same lashing every now and then. Hence, everyone is usually afraid in meetings, not because they don't have updates to give, but because they are afraid of getting disrespected. Top management is aware of this S architect's rude behavior, but everyone in the company says that he generates profits. So, everything he does and the mistreatments are swept under the rug.
Who is that control freak
I understand that you have had a positive journey with the company and that you believe my points were exaggerated and biased. While I appreciate your point of view, I want to confidently reiterate that my review was based on my personal experiences and observations. Additionally, I would like to emphasize that all the individuals working in the team responsible for developing the new storage architecture for Druva share the same sentiments. Furthermore, I assure you that nothing in my review has been over-amplified. I have strived to present actual facts without incorporating any personal biased opinions. I am open to being proven wrong on any of the points mentioned in my review. If sharing a review which shows a company in bad light makes me a disgruntled employee than majority of the people working in the company are disgruntled, as I would advise you to go and check the reviews on glassdoor and enlighten yourself. The main point I aim to convey in my review is that there appears to be a higher proportion of disgruntled employees at Druva compared to content and satisfied employees, such as yourself. Through my review, I have aimed to provide a high-level overview of the issues that exist within the company. I firmly believe that it is crucial for individuals to share their honest experiences, both positive and negative, in order to enable others to make well-informed decisions. @jEMp10, Please keep a check on my comment on this post where I say I will provide concrete instances to validate my points.Might help you as well as other who are thinking to join druva, regarding how things work over here.
Even though you might be disgruntled, you should share your feedback here, thats what this platform is for. Though I reiterate personal bias is at play. If who i am thinking that architect is correct then i have had positive exp, but anyways. Hope you find what you are looking for.
Yes.. good experience with the architect. Smell a lot of personal grudge
All the team members who work in this new storage architecture team have read this review, and all of them are happy and relieved that someone stood up to write about the truth regarding how things are run in such an unsustainable way. But oh, would you believe it? You think it's just one person's personal grudge. Sure, sure.
I can confirm all these points, have been there and itโs very shitty place to be.
Hi @annoy19 Iโm considering a role at Druva - can you tell me what location you work from? And are you an Engineer? Just trying to gauge if Iโd have a similar experience. Feel free to DM me. Thx!
I am an engineer, what op has written has some truth in some teams. I agree with him in some aspects, my experience has been much better( better teammates , mostly no weekend work) but i know its not the case everywhere in druva. My experience has been good so far. My major gripe has been the layoff morale is really low after that and the family feeling we had is gone; now everyone i talk to says its just a job and nothing more.! no increments and sub par salary compared to industry standard in similar companies. I know of a guy who had asked druva to match the compensation but when layoffs happened he was let go, so basically they took advantage of the guy and laid him off at the worst time. He genuinely trusted druva and stayed here despite having competing offers, why match his salary when u want to just lay him off later after removing his dependencies, thats ethically wrong.
* Your experience might have been good with Druva till now, but my points have been laid out to let people know what happens on an organizational level and how the company functions internally. * Furthermore, HRs encourage people to write positive reviews on Glassdoor because they know themselves how toxic their environment has become. Just go and check the reviews on Glassdoor, and you will come to know the reality. And when you ask the company people about the reviews on glassdoor and whether it is true, they will say yes, but this doesn't happen in our team. Yet, once you spend enough time in that team, you will come to know that this toxicity has spread like cancer throughout the company. * And if the company is really as good as you are claiming it to be, then why is the average tenure of an employee just 1-1.5 years? * Your last point basically validates what I have mentioned in point 12 of mine. The company is not employee-centric at all. * @BunnyBunz Please do your thorough research before joining Druva. And refer to the summary of the post to get to know about what you would be dealing with if you decide to join the company.