Endeca Technologies Reviews in Boston, MA Area

Pros

The work life balance is great. This includes the office environment which has short cubicle walls and pretty much no walls within a team pod. You will generally find mature smart young people who can communicate well. It's nice to be working in small teams and seeing all phases of software development cycle. The promise of a potential liquidity event.

Cons

The compensation package is not as competitive as some of the other more well-established software companies.. in certain parts of the organization the engineering teams re-org too frequently but sometimes not soon enough. The promise of a potential liquidity event.

Pros

Great startup atmosphere
People are very bright and generally work hard
Lots of outings and team-building activities make working here fun
Kendall Square is a pretty good location close to the city
A cereal bar and endless supply of snacks in the pantry

Cons

The place is run by incompetent managers who once were competent engineers. They place no value on careers of individuals and stifle growth every way they can. I have observed a steady stream of top-notch engineering talent leave the company with the frequency of about one or two per months for as long as I have been here.
Engineers are viewed as robots for building software and are not allowed to participate in defining the product. Instead they get army-like orders from product management who seems incompetent compared with my experiences at other companies yet displays the level of arrogance and snobbery I have never seen before.
To make matters worse, the culture within the company, while young and dynamic in many ways, resembles a union when it comes to professional matters. Everything from project ownership and responsibilities to cubicle assignments is decided based on people's tenure in the company. Those who have been here for a few years develop a clique mentality, while new employees are often put down for trying to provide fresh technical perspective until they submit to "the way things are done at Endeca".

Advice to Senior Management

Stop running the company like a seniority-based union, enable communication between teams, hire capable product management, and try to retain what talented engineers you have left.

Pros

Smart people
interesting technology
Fun environment
Opportunity for advancement with the right work ethic
Trying to do right by the employees and the customers

Cons

Sometimes really smart people shouldn't be in charge
Changing direction feel a bit lost which impacted their success
Grew too fast beyond ability to succeed.

Advice to Senior Management

Look at who is leading you where

Pros

Nice place to work, friendly and smart people. Like to balance work and play, it is a fun place to work overall with a nice product and travel opportunities if wanted.

Cons

Lots of product direction changes and lack of choice in career path and career growth. Lofty company goals that are always around the next corner

Advice to Senior Management

Make this place successful!

Pros

strong talent pool at the developer level

Cons

Incompetent Sr. Management
Non-Existent HR
Rapid Technology Direction changes
Failing sales strategy

Advice to Senior Management

Go work for someone else. Your inexperience at simple leadership has dragged the company down for years. It's time to go.

Pros

Lots of smart people around you. Innovative technology. Festive work atmosphere. Really good at adopting and using open source / latest technology.

Cons

Upper management was young and inexperienced. Egotistical after post start up success. Difficulty in choosing a path and recognizing difficulty in enterprise space.

Advice to Senior Management

Change out start up management with seasoned professionals.

Pros

Really exciting problems - very large scale data storage and analysis for latency and throughput sensitive applications. Toward the front of the curve for large scale distributed enterprise search software. Very smart people that are excited about the things they are working on. Great place to learn and/or teach engineering skills. Good social atmosphere in development.

Cons

Management as a whole lacks management experience. Bottom level of managers seems to be made up mostly of engineers that were forced into management for lack of better options for team leads. General lack of empowerment in development - lots of "proposals" and "reviews," with no way to make real progress on controversial topics. Architectural leadership disconnected too much from reality and delivery concerns. Communication throughout the entire organization is spotty. New business strategy seems risky, and not much has been done to convince development it is viable. Compensation not adjusted in past 2 years.

Advice to Senior Management

Empower employees and trust them to deliver. Cut down on unnecessary process. Communicate plans and direction earlier and more clearly. Stop pretending compensation isn't an issue.

Pros

* smart people who are great at software development
* friendly culture
* real emphasis on quality of software
* product excels compared to other options in the field
* if you're passionate about software engineering, this is a good place to be

Cons

* good engineers dont necessarily make good managers, lack of training of managers
* company direction swings a lot - informing development vs getting buy in from development reduces ownership
* lack of transparency of executive decisions

Advice to Senior Management

* Invest in grooming good managers
* increase transparency and decrease politics
* encourage loyalty - high turnover makes people think about why they're still around

Pros

Endeca is full of very smart, passionate, creative people. They are delivering a product that deals with data on a massive scale, which leads to some extremely interesting problems that need to be solved. The next generation of Endeca technology is being designed and built right now, and it is an exciting process to be a part of. The office environment is very open - impromptu meetings, on topics ranging from future core architecture to how to fix that nasty compile error, are a daily occurrence. Even junior engineers have a chance to make a big impact on the product, and there are plenty of opportunities to get involved with architecture, technical leadership, or management, depending on your interests. There are also free snacks, a foosball table, several Wiis, and often beer on Fridays to put to good use when it is time to take a break.

Cons

The senior engineering leadership team at Endeca is somewhat inexperienced. There is no question that they are technically competent, however their ability to effectively lead large teams of developers is still developing. Fire drills where project priorities get flipped upside down are not uncommon, but becoming less frequent as time goes on. Also, some restraints are placed on the development process to avoid having teams go off into a corner for 6 months to build something that no one actually wants - this is a good thing - however, these restraints sometimes make it difficult to innovate, and architecting the next generation of Endeca software can be frustrating in this environment.

Advice to Senior Management

Engineering needs a stable, consistent feature plan to always be in place for the next 3-6 months in order to effectively plan and execute.

Pros

Interesting technology in an interesting industry. A variety of different projects to work on, especially if you like C++, XQuery, and distributed processing challenges! Great coworkers!

Cons

Management doesn't communicate well with employees. Some of the Engineering Managers focus more on minimizing risk than delivering innovative software solutions. A few years ago the engineering culture was more fun, with employees at every level making decisions and working together to deliver truly innovative solutions. Now the engineering managers spend most of their time in meetings *talking* about doing work while the rest of the employees actually get it done (often with little input from the managers who attended all the meetings).

Advice to Senior Management

Rumors are often the method that information is disseminated among employees. People are going to find out eventually, so why not just tell them directly?