C3 AI Reviews

Pros

Fast growth company with good market future.

Cons

No obvious one so far

Pros

Pay is decent, tho the signing has a 1.5y not prorated period at a company where the average turnover seems to be < 1y due to constant firings and people quitting. Spend it at your own risk.

Cons

Never in my life have I seen a turnover & morale problem as bad as with C3 AI. This is a company where you're going to be stressed every waking minute of your day, where getting yelled at is almost a given & not thought of as concerning, where your manager will likely not respect you, and where you will constantly be in fear of getting fired. The problem seems to be worst on the RWC sales & pre-sales side with entire teams getting gutted out of thin air regardless of performance, driven by the whims of fickle leadership. Most who remain seem to leave on their own accord anyway lol. H1B folk, join at your own risk ... at-will employment is real here and is used often. The 5d in-person thing is obnoxious, especially since (as of this review) these roles are still listed as hybrid on LinkedIn ...

Pros

Solutions engineer is a great role that combines full-stack software engineering with creative problem-solving. Very exciting time to be at the company. Great compensation. You could build a YC funded company by building any one of the apps that we make in each project. Plenty of exposure to different verticals and business problems.

Cons

You need to fit the psychological profile to work here. A lot of people love it and work here for a long time, but some really don't like it which is why you might see negative reviews on this site. There's nothing wrong with that, C3 does not pretend to be all things for all people. If you are up for the challenge, though, you will have a great time.

Pros

You’ll be making meaningful contributions and pushed to become a better engineer. Very smart and collaborative coworkers in engineering. Good pay

Cons

As rewarding as the work can be, the expectations asked of you can be a lot. Everyone here works very hard and it will be detrimental if you’re seen as someone just putting in the “normal” hours. People constantly work late, and it’s not uncommon to be expected to work extra hours . Always a lot of fires happening, and cycles of high scrambling and stress are frequent

Pros

* As many others have said, there are amazing individual contributors at this company. I worked with some of my favorite people here. * If you'd like to be really good at pre-mortems at your next job, you'll get a lot of experience here at fighting fires and watching poorly-thought-out decisions go south. This is good experience for the future, no doubt about that.

Cons

* lots of fire-fighting instead of planning * lots of poorly-thought-out decisions that result in successful projects being derailed instead of supported and pet projects with no track record of success being handed talent that was pulled from other teams * lots of very bright people with excellent degrees and little-to-no real-world experience of the industry they're working with (I will say that C3 is trying to change that. I'm not convinced they're successful yet.) * choleric CEO whose whims have often derailed entire projects/departments because he isn't patient enough to wait for results or doesn't understand what the product does * (upper) management who is scared of said CEO, so do not communicate issues clearly upward * exodus of experienced talent in the last year I was there * worst company-wide culture I've ever experienced, a large part of which is directly traceable back to management/the CEO (note that individual teams may be exempt from this, but it's hard to maintain that under the outside pressure)

Pros

Good salary and benefits. Great space to be in.

Cons

Poor morale and micro-management. Poor work life balance

Pros

I met some great team members at this company.

Cons

Leadership will take entire teams into conference rooms to pick on people and shame them in front of their teams. It's common for people to get fired on the spot, and I've witnessed this multiple times. The culture allows incompetent people to thrive by rewarding aggression and enabling them to shift the blame on other people. Because of this, the working environment is fear-based. A lot of bullies rise in the ranks by yelling at and intimidating other people. The CEO has a lot of old-world ideas and has actually mentioned that he doesn't want women to work at his company if they are planning to get pregnant. The underlying ethos is that you will be rewarded for working constantly even if you're not productive. We had work-from-home rights on Fridays that were taken away. There aren't a lot of people who stay beyond one year and, if they do, they're probably someone who is benefiting from the system of putting other people down.

Pros

- Brilliant employees. I was constantly impressed by the caliber of the individuals I had the pleasure of working with. - Plethora of opportunities to advance your career and take on new challenges. - Fascinating problems. The work was deeply interesting and and deeply rewarding to solve. - Good office perks (food, gym, etc). - Fun parties.

Cons

- Toxic executives. A constant "my way or the highway" attitude. Engineers estimate development would take a month? How about you make that take a week. You will work weekends to make this happen. - Very little work from home flexibility. One WFH day a week was very welcome, but we were obviously able to maintain a high level of performance when working from home during the peak of the pandemic, but that did not matter. The CEO wants people in the office. - The CEO. Tom definitely knows how to run a successful business, but the ways that he made that happen were terrifying at best and downright abusive at worst. Very dismissive of valid employee suggestions/feedback during company updates, unable to admit that he was wrong, and his direction for the company would shift with the slightest inkling of a new idea - often times failing in glorious displays of wasted engineering effort.

Pros

- The technology empowers some of the largest/influential companies in the world to be more efficient and gain better insight of their data, and generally -- do and be better - Customers come from a variety of industries, creating interesting work and use cases - Culture is strong with personable folks from a rich variety of backgrounds -- at most times they're ready/willing to help - Daily lunch is a nice perk, snacks are stocked, and the gym is good (although it closes a bit too early) - Nice office HQ location by the water

Cons

- Top-heavy. You'll work hard at your own expense depending on what leadership decides is the best idea at the time - Heavy culture of 'working hard' to be grow/develop yourself. However, I think the phrase "work harder, not smarter" tends to be the case more frequently than the other way around. Emergencies tend to be manufactured at the case of getting something done just cause - Results-oriented, but at the cost of not knowing the actual means of how to get there - At one point, leadership decided to move our team from 4-days a week to 5-days a week work-from-office -- completely uprooting our team's routine and workflow. Felt like it was supposed to light a fire to improve performance -- but in reality, it basically dissolved any trust between leadership and the team in one fell swoop

Pros

Coworkers are nice to work with. Some of them stayed in this company for a very long time and still stay humble and help others.

Cons

1. Top down management: they don’t care about your growth or mental health: no matter you are a pm/ engineer. You are just an employee to work here. Based on their so-called project priorities, they can move you to any team, without discussing with you. Even though it will mess up your performance, it will mess up your growth and goals, it doesn’t matter, they don’t care. If you read to hear, you can find almost every negative review, CEO selected X or -, people are telling truth but they covered their ears and told themselves it’s not true. 2. Not being trust from every side: from the time you are working on background check, you can feel how this company “trust” you. It’s like treating you as a criminal, almost. After joining in, coworkers are great, they don’t know anything. But tops are not. They think wfh is not efficient. They even feel proud that the parking lot is full. Stupid logic. How about those people who stay in office but they do their own things? They even compare this with Google’s parking lot. They assume you are not working at wfh day. Even lunch time, they will ask someone to stay there, to watch people to get only one meal at a time, like in prison. People can feel this “not being trust”. 3. Messed up work flow: they said they need people to work on most prioritized project. At this time they run a platform upgrade. Then most engineers /projects somehow got stuck for several days. People are doing silly “migration” for months without working on anything else. Tops they don’t know what is priority. Engineers are not driven anything. Even the project language/package, sorry not your choice. Engineers are not listened. They are just employees. Engineers are everywhere, they can hire many from Mexico. They don’t care about big companies/ better work flows because it’s their company, not yours. They don’t want to listen. You need to follow. That’s why this company is full of new grads. 4. Fake reviews on Glassdoor: one task during onboarding is to write a great review on Glassdoor. I’m so happy that I didn’t do that. After 6-12 months you would know this company is not worth it. If you are not a fresh graduate and you worked in other better companies before.