Lucidworks Reviews

Pros

innovative quadrant leader at reported by Gartner

Cons

lots of work, some travel

Pros

There are some good people who do their best to help their coworkers and customers. There is a strong effort to bring diversity and inclusion to the company and open discussion and education about this topic.

Cons

There have been many posts about the ineffectiveness of the C-level team and it’s all true. Each year the executive team tries to reinvent the company and the product and each year there’s a new challenge that we can overcome if we just do XYZ. Company kickoffs begin with the CEO trying to inspire staff with new visions, new directions, and a plan to grow the product and customer base; and each year we start over. Job postings have increased yet we’ve had very little employee growth during the last couple of years. Attrition is high and departments work in silos. It speaks volumes about the ineffective leadership across each department. We have a product that many positive reviews suggest is a “search leader”, yet we don’t use our own product internally. Why? It’s a question that has never been answered. If you choose to join this company, you will hear terms like “summits” and “basecamp.” It’s a creative analogy to mountain climbing the executive team likes to use to rally around making our product better and helping our customers achieve their goals. You may hear phrases like, “We can’t make it to the summit without bringing everyone with us.” Year after year, the problem is leadership likes to move or “blow up” the mountain we’re all striving to climb together. As a result, everyone in the company falls down the mountain in the avalanche. Teams decimated. Morale is dipping. Very few take command. The list goes on and on. We can’t make it to the summit when the executive team constantly destroys the mountain. Some may say, these are the growing pains of any startup. Lucidworks was founded in 2007 and the CEO has been in charge for over 7 years. At what point does the “growing pains” excuse get tossed out and real, effective change is made? Values: The People Team will overly emphasize the “values” of the company, yet they are rarely practiced. Honor people: there are many in this company that will do whatever it takes and happily work with you to get the job done, which is refreshing. Be curious: Many have been curious about the future of this company, why departments are allowed to function in vacuums, etc. Some have asked about this in eNPS surveys but it falls on deaf ears. We are told to ask why we do things a certain way, yet I rarely get an answer. Champion customers: This is a tough one. I believe many in the company want to do what’s best for their customers. The issue is there is no real, effective plan to do that. Some employees are left to flounder on doing what’s best. Align & commit: A favorite phrase in tech. Leadership keeps changing the vision of what we should align and commit to. You may get alignment within your department, but don’t expect that when working across departments. Break the bottle: This is perhaps the one you’ll hear the most from day 1. It’s good in theory, but new ideas, curiosity, and challenging the status quo are not truly encouraged. Enjoy this: If you enjoy taking one step forward and two steps back annually or if you like constant change for the sake of change maybe this is the place for you. I don’t know how long this Board will allow the same ineffective decisions to perpetuate. Do yourself a favor and look elsewhere.

Pros

There are some good people here

Cons

Far too many to count

Pros

Innovative and creative company Talented tech team Friendly working environment and work from home policies

Cons

Pains of a growing company

Pros

Evolving from an on-premises offering to the cloud; new focus is on building features that add value instead of unnecessary plumbing Strong product architecture and vision Opportunities to gain hands-on experience with cloud platforms, Kubernetes, microservices, ML modeling, search, and big data Product management has been weak, if not outright incompetent for the past several years; new head of product is bringing in fresh, technical PMs to address product short-comings

Cons

PS consultants lack basic cloud knowledge & skills and prefer whining about change instead of improving their craft Product has too many rough edges, especially in the UI and docs, but leadership is not investing in fixing these issues Bloated Customer success org filled with non-technical people that are in over their head on basic technical concepts; they are glorified meeting schedulers that panic over every issue, there's no buffer between these panicked CS people and the engineering org Product is built on Solr Cloud which is too unstable at scale; company needs to either invest heavily in making Solr more robust or build a better solution for the cloud. The Solr team seems clueless about these issues.

Pros

1) Huge market opportunity that extends far beyond search + AI and touches many adjacent, lucrative markets. If we nail this thing, we can build an amazing business. 2) Genuinely good people. Yes there are some exceptions, but this place has a lot of heart and most of the employees are smart, helpful and just downright good folks. 3) I've seen some of the recent negative reviews, but it just hasn't been my experience at the company. Nobody likes getting made redundant (especially in times like these), so I can understand the raw nerves, but you should take the reviews with a grain of salt.

Cons

The Cons are typical of any burgeoning enterprise software startup - tough to get everyone rowing in the same direction, a large workload, general frustrations at trying to move a business in a new direction. I do think Lucidworks needs to get more disciplined. The market opportunity won't last forever and the company needs to execute this pivot.

Pros

I enjoy going to work every day, and I get to collaborate with kind, intelligent colleagues. We have hundreds of happy customers who believe in what our product already does for them and who look forward to new features in the roadmap. Our product delivery cadence is becoming faster and more predictable.

Cons

Our Fusion product strategy has been inconsistent, but that is changing with our focus on the cloud. Our company is going through some growing pains, shaking off the scrappy, manual work processes of a small company and moving towards more mature, program-based approaches that match our current size and market presence.

Pros

- The company was able to get some great funding so, you'll go to some great parties and eat some great snacks - Handful of the people here might be the good ones

Cons

- It's all a sham! All this glory that you see is a facade. Management is so loose with funding. A huge portion is spent on extravagant parties and swanky offices and not the stuff that matters - THIS COMPANY HAS NO VISION!! The direction changes every 6 months or sooner and many employees are displaced because of that. Management cannot decide what this company wants to be, even if their life depends on it - Politics is rampant. Not one person here can be trusted. Especially HR! - People are lured with promises of growth and titles and then they get left out in the cold shortly after with no recourse - All the good employees have left and gone to other companies. They knew it was time to say goodbye to a failing company - Management is incompetent.