Okta Reviews

Pros

- heavy focus on work life balance - keen to hire great talent - flexible working

Cons

- can sometimes be slow to change

Pros

Great work life balance Great growth opportunity Good company name

Cons

Slow to promote Large company - if that is a con for you

Pros

There were a lot of other great colleagues, some nice benefits, and a few extra perks.

Cons

A structurally unsound structure with a nice coat of paint on it. The nice perks seen to be somewhat of a cover for major underlying issues. There is an apparent leadership vacuum at top levels, especially with recent exits. A relatively recent acquisition of another company has experienced notable integration issues. Core root causes of other various issues seem to continue to go unresolved. There was a lot of growth but insufficient planning to go with it. Recent layoffs severely hurt goodwill, were made with shortsighted thinking, all of which is a result of a string of decisions not made diligently. in addition, teams often work in silos and collaboration is a major challenge.

Pros

Generous benefits package. Unlimited PTO. Fairly competitive salaries. Monetary increases are pretty standard... 1-3% plus potential bonuses, etc. Salaries are not pro-rated based on geographical location. Restricted Stock Options (RSU) and Stock Purchase Program available. Employees can typically choose their location to work (in-office, hybrid, remote). A lot of internal social groups (ie Women of Okta, People of Color, etc.). Free training to become Okta certified. For those who go in to the office, plenty of snacks and beverages. There's even a 21+ "Speak Easy". Certain days of the week are catered.

Cons

Management is constantly shifting staff and org chart. Advancement milestones and requirements shift with each new manager. Promotions are promised but do not come to fruition. Many employees have been at Okta for several years and never see a promotion but new hires tend to be fast tracked into Sr. roles despite lacking the necessary skillset. Peer review process is somewhat skewed, subjective, and sometimes non-applicable (ie managers asking you to peer review someone you've never interacted or worked with). No consistent performance review process. You can work at Okta for years with a solid track record and a new manager can come in and give you a poor performance review and no one (upper management, HR, etc.) will question the sudden change in review outcome.

Pros

You gain exposure to an entire swathe of industry standards and products. It's among the best of the best, and you'll have the opportunity to see the whole underbelly of one of the biggest names in identity SaaS.

Cons

Thinking back on the layoff, the way they were initiated was outright cunning. Weeks before, they had us remove oAuth keys to company repositories citing that it was a "security" issue, even though most profiles were required to be linked to a verified okta email domain. On top of that, internal tools started to misbehave for what sounded like most people being let go. Rather than tell us outright, we woke up to cowardly emails telling us we'd been let go for dubious reasons. In typical corporate fashion, system tools had their access revoked remotely, and the computer was bricked at some point. We were invited to a Zoom meeting where they expressed how sorry they were and this, that, and the third. I could really feel the human connection as they read off their script. I think pitiful old me was playing in the background as well. I was practically in tears! Anyways, it's just another job at the end of the day. If you're looking for a "family" or any other buzzword, go see your own because you won't even find friends here. Have a good day and be well, reader!

Pros

Great team culture, culture, and growth trajectory prior to the Auth0 acquisition in 2021. I worked at Okta from 2018 - 2021. As with any company, there were stressful times and a few unpleasant coworkers. But for the most part, it was amazing. The benefit was competitive, the culture was good, and there seemed to be a lot of potentials for Okta to become one of the most successful SaaS / Cloud businesses in the B2B space.

Cons

The Auth0 acquisition was when everything really started to go downhill. The stock value that existing employees spent so many years building went down the drain, Auth0 employees &og Okta employees were not getting along, compromising the overall company culture. And the stress of appeasing stakeholders after so much money was spent on the acquisition really cause a lot stress on everyone. Many of the amazing leaders built the company to what it was quickly left after. Oh, one more con: minority groups (POCs, queer folks, women, etc) in leadership are the exception, not the norm. I have seen so many talented coworkers be passed up for promotion only for much less qualified cis white men take the spot.

Pros

Leadership encourages having a healthy work-life balance, which was a breath of fresh air. Even in the circumstance of underperformance and low quota attainment across the commercial sales organization, I did not feel any sense of micromanagement. *Completely dependent on your direct supervisor Reimburse monthly internet and mobile expenses. Market leader. Everyone will have at a minimum heard of Okta. The technology is A1. Easy wins if you inherit the right existing customer base.

Cons

Where to start... 1. Territory planning for FY23 was an absolute disaster and set reps up for failure. There was no thought into how territories would be equitable across reps. Especially with the overhiring and saturating a patch even more, you would think they would be some effort into making it reasonably fair, but this was not the case. I can count on 1 hand how many reps hit their number across the ENTIRE CML org. 2. Does anyone know anything? Whenever you ask your "leader" for guidance or help, it falls on deaf ears. Or when they finally get back to you, generally the answer is ask this person. Then that person will tell you to it falls on someone else. Long story short, if you need help, you're better off (and could save time) if you try to find out the answer yourself. 3. Very little employee recognition. You might get a Slack shoutout if you're lucky. Overall, just a very disorganized company. I'd like to think this was largely due to the Splunk execs bringing in their playbook that would take us to El Cap and the auth0 acquisition integration challenges, but it fell short. No matter how much effort and work you put in, if you're in the sales team, you will most likely be left feeling defeated.

Pros

okta is listening. Nobody is trying to hide the fact that last year was hard. Numbers were off, company was bloated and sr leadership was out of touch. This year, the senior leaders who created the mess are now exited. Quotas are attainable and if you're exceeding, this could be a career year for many people. Much of sales leadership is new and bring a new level of experience the old guard just never had. Politics are being replaced with performance and the team is getting into their groove. World class marketing events and brand in the market place. Our customers love our product.

Cons

There are challenges like anywhere. Internal systems are difficult at times, what should be simple tasks can be over complicated. Information is all over the place and can be tough to find, sort and leverage. But it's not prohibitive to doing the job, just annoying at times.

Pros

Great culture and leadership. Could not ask for better

Cons

Okta is a large public company. Its common to experience growing pains and more internal work needed to get things done. This is really a small pain if I had to choose one but overall, Okta has been a great place to work

Pros

They are transparent. They care about the well being of most employees. Great product and most customers respect the company and the workers.

Cons

Too focused on chasing investor wants and not on customer wants. Creating silos to exclude organizations from company benefits (some orgs do not get “wellness days” that the rest of the computer get) - major employee morale breaker and red flag for upcoming changes. “Customer First” now means “Employee Last” when just a few months ago it was “How can we best set up our employees to put our Customers First” Transparency is “this is what is being done” - no transparency in the deliberation or reasoning. There has been a major change in the culture over the past 8-10 months and most of it coming after the Employee Satisfaction Survey was completed. The solutions put forth recently seem to be cutting customer facing jobs and creating more management level positions.