Great product, internally a bit astray - werkgeversreview Software Engineer bij Glean (CA)

3,0
16 jan 2023
Aanbevelen
Goedkeuring directeur
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Pluspunten

The product is very good overall, and has a very good foundation tech wise. It looks modern, has good features and does its job well. Early people were clearly very good at what they were doing, since I feel some of those early decisions are what's keeping things going somewhat smoothly. There are a lot of interesting problems to work on that will help you with growth (though not all people get to work on these). I feel like there’s good behavior on design docs, and experienced people will give you really good feedback. This fosters a place where you don’t just get spoon fed the answer and actually have to solve problems for yourself. Velocity for adding new features is amazing and I think this brings a lot of value to our customers.

Minpunten

Time off has become a joke. Previously it was unlimited, now they still advertise it as such but it's a hard 15 days, and then you need a really really really good reason to take more. When they added time off tracking they pretended it’s just for more info, but it’s become quite strict. Leadership keeps making decisions in private, and then just doing internal PR moves about the decision, pretending it’s still up for discussion, while they move forward with it even if very few people agree. When there’s any dissent, they publicly stop it. Work-culture wise, the company is in a very scary place. If you own even a semi-important product, you’ll be bombarded with questions. Questions that are easily found if you use our own product that we’re building. If we’re not using it, who will? Work life balance has gone downhill to the point where if you mute your slack during the weekend, your first part of Monday is answering all the questions people DM-ed you on slack. Benefits are sub-mediocre, same with holiday time off. They never add new holidays; they just juggle them around, swapping one for the other. The quality of new software engineers has gone downhill, probably because the onboarding is very bad. This is a bit scary since it might cause bigger issues later on. Might also be because hiring has shifted from “everyone needs to agree” to higher ups pushing people through the process. Lots of our fixes are now just bandaids to problems people have added. The number of ‘urgent’ cherry picks every release is hilariously large.

Ontdek andere reviews over Glean (CA)

5,0
10 apr 2026
Aanbevelen
Goedkeuring directeur
Zakelijk vooruitzicht

Pluspunten

Excellent peer group Full ownership Fast moving

Minpunten

Couldn't think of any cons

3,0
6 jun 2026
Aanbevelen
Goedkeuring directeur
Zakelijk vooruitzicht

Pluspunten

Glean will be a business school case study, just not the one its founders envisioned. First mover advantage. A category defining product. Fortuitous timing on the LLM wave. Substantial capital. All the preconditions for a generational company.

Minpunten

So what went wrong? Execution. Specifically, at the CEO and senior leader level. Arvinds fundamental error was neither strategic nor technical it was deeply human: an inability to trust or support the people who actually built the business, and a corresponding unwillingness to invest in them. The hunters, the builders, the lemon growers, the gritty, conviction driven sellers and engineers who took Glean from nothing to meaningful ARR were systematically shown the door or left in droves with disillusionment from the lack of support and investment. In their place has arrived a cohort of legacy, old world, leaders and executives imported from Google and similar corporate graveyards; operators who have spent careers not growing markets, but growing sharp elbows, managing spreadsheets and playing internal politics. The lemon squeezers have arrived at Glean. The distinction is not semantic. It is existential. Market builders and market optimisers are categorically different organisms. One is comfortable with ambiguity, energised by creation, capable of making something from nothing, hungry to change the world. The other is an instrument for extracting value from conditions that already exist and extracting personal recognition for the hard work of their teams. Neither is interchangeable with the other. In a hyper competitive and intense AI landscape where every credible competitor is playing aggressive offence , compressing sales cycles, expanding TAM, commoditising yesterday's differentiators, Glean assembled a gotomarket organisation and leadership architected for defence and internal politics. The consequences are entirely foreseeable: a revenue organisation unable to compete at the pace the market demands, ceding ground in real time while the broader landscape accelerates around it. The darkest joke in the business? The largest ARR contributor on the P&L is the interest accruing on the Series F sitting idle in the bank. That is not a growth story. That is a case study in institutional self sabotage, and the syllabus is still being written.

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