PagerDuty Reviews

Pros

Great culture! Coming from startup and unicorn land, it's very refreshing to be at a company that values good communication and teamwork over "rockstars" and cowboy coders. I've not encountered a single big ego here - instead, everyone is always willing to answer questions patiently and without judgement. This is also the most trustworthy leadership I've ever worked under - I feel taken care of as an employee and I trust that they're taking us in a good direction. This is also the most diverse group I've ever worked with - especially with the outstanding (for tech) female:male ratio in engineering. They also seem to be all about promoting from within - so there is a lot of opportunity for career growth here for engineers.

Cons

Sometimes processes can be better documented, but I think that's just part of being a quickly growing company. Management are great people - but I've noticed they're stretched a little thin sometimes.

Pros

Most PD employees are super nice and in general the company has tons of emotional intelligence. Lots of support for underrepresented groups, especially through employee resource groups. Good diversity stats compared to the industry and region (board and execs included). Managers go on-call too, not just line level workers. Work/life balance was quite reasonable, although it depends significantly on the team. Ask lots of questions about the on-call load for the specific team you're considering joining.

Cons

Strong tendency to cargo cult technical decisions and appeal to authority in discussions, probably exacerbated by.. Cultural fear of being wrong, caused by a small group in engineering who treat every interaction as a battle to be won. It wasn't uncommon for people to express fear of asking questions in certain channels out of fear one of these people (or their emulators) making them feel stupid. The engineering department probably wastes half its budget redoing work to use increasingly niche technologies as top engineers' interests meander. Most valuable stuff is owned by a team and a rotation, so if you're not a manager or lead, opportunities for individual ownership can be limited, which can make career growth challenging beyond early career.

Pros

Management is trusting of employees to do work and as such allow a lot of perks - unlimited remote work, no facetime culture etc..

Cons

Growing pains and overlap between products can sometimes lead to duplicate work

Pros

For entry level or early career employees, this is a good place to work since they don't know any better and are impressed by catering and the appearance of good cultural values. You can see this reflected in the multitude of reviews talking about food, working from home whenever they want, autonomy, vacation time, and other nonsense.

Cons

Want to know why PagerDuty is a great place to work and for whom? Leadership is largely ineffective preferring to keep employees happy (enable their entitlement, bend over backwards when they complain about absolutely anything - which is a lot) to get the awards for best place to work (hard to recruit if your workplace ratings are poor). Middle management is struggling to effectively manage and hold their teams accountable, resulting in employees having a stranglehold on their managers. It is difficult to move out non-performers or unqualified employees leaving managers frustrated and incapable of being able to build solid performing teams. Most director level managers want to leave PagerDuty because when they attempt to implement real change they get a lot of pushback and don't get the support they need from leadership or the People team. There are some employees that have either sabotaged newcomers ability to be successful or have bad mouthed and ostracized them when they have tried to change the status quo. How can they do this? Because leadership favors a particular group of loyalists despite their inexperience. This is not isolated to a team or two; it is pervasive. Many employees are promoted without qualifications. So if you are early in your career and want an opportunity to learn on the job, work at your own pace, come and go as you please, refuse to learn from those with more experience, then this is your deal. If you are at the director level, you will struggle to make an impact and should look elsewhere where your experience will be respected and valued.

Pros

A wonderful culture where you get supported and are expected to do the same. They seem to be very willing to try and fail, and if it's a failure they try to learn from the experience. They're also incredibly diverse and very modern in their thinking. I love the fact that they follow they've given 1% of their equity, 1% of their employees time and 1% of their product to charitable causes. They also really do put the customer first which is what most organizations say but PD really does. I also really do appreciate the fact that they're willing to have remote employees and allow folks who are working at an office turn to remote working as well.

Cons

Their tendency to run fast can create some interesting snarls to unkink but they ack and own and really do try to learn from their mistakes.