Pros
I purposely waited over a year since my last day at Rackspace to write the review so I could give a unique perspective for individuals that are looking to join the Rackspace team. Rackspace has changed a lot over the years as companies grow, and it continues to change since it's gone private. As others have noted the people here at Rackspace are really the "secret sauce" and they make the job a lot better than most places. For most of my Rackspace tenure it was conveyed to me that if I had a good idea, and could back it up with qualitative data -- it might get implemented and in my experience some of my leaders meant what they said. People are very passionate and open in most areas so that helps as well. In my experience many of the people whether they are in leadership or in another role are very happy to help another Racker out. Career growth can definitely happen here. In 11 years I had 9 different roles and I moved 5 times for Rackspace. On several teams I got to build what the team would look like in the present and in the future which was very exciting and invigorating. Rackspace looks good on the resume. I've been very proud to say that I worked at Rackspace and I continue to be proud of my time and my accomplishments that I had there.
Cons
Sometimes when companies grow they lose sight of the criteria that they need to have for individuals be it management or at the individual contributor level. Throughout my time at Rackspace, but particularly the later years I would alternate working with highly competent leadership to utterly incompetent who seemingly failed to grasp basic concepts. Rackspace seemed to be promoting people based on some inconsistent or non quantifiable agenda as well because one could see where people would get promoted to senior leadership roles without really contributing a lot before and after. As others have said, Rackspace has far too many senior leaders (Senior Manager, Director, VP levels) and IMO this is largely due to a significant portion of them being unfit for their role. In many cases you can see a person go from a front line manager to senior manager and a director all in the space of 3 to 4 years. Working at Rackspace you'll often find yourself being paid below market rates, and I think that the massive amount salary going to useless leadership is one of the key reasons why. As a potential candidate for joining Rackspace you'll have to be pretty smart and picky about what you're doing there. They've essentially lost in Public Cloud, and likely Private Cloud as well. Their Dedicated service line is largely flat, and all of these things cost an enormous amount of money while yielding low margin results. Rackspace has started doing some downsizing, and if you're being realistic you should know that the company will look dramatically different in say 3 years than it does now. Rackspace is/will be venturing back to being a support based company, which is great if you work in consulting or support for other cloud products, but not so good if you actually support the infrastructure, tooling, data centers, or networking for Rackspace specific items. You may be living in San Antonio. While the city is nice, if Rackspace doesn't work out you might find that you have to move since there's basically only USAA and a small amount of other IT companies around.