Pure Storage Employee Reviews about "favoritism"

Pros

Good benefits & salary Many great individuals

Cons

Growing pains! The company still functions as a start-up, and there are many problems with teams working in silos. I do think that Pure has potential, but I would avoid it for at least a year while they work things out. I can't speak for other departments, but Marketing has a toxic culture that enables bullies, mean girls, and pits people against each other. There is a considerable problem with favoritism, and there is a severe lack of transparency. The Pure way is to thrive on chaos, and attempts to provide structure are often ignored or pushed back on.

Pros

Smart and nice people. Good benefits. Some good leaders

Cons

-All Talks, No Initiatives -Lies, LIES and MORE LIES -Favoritism -Toxic Work Environment

Pros

- competitive pay - good perks - lunches, 401k match, snacks, espp, cell phone allowance - good product

Cons

- Bad leadership plagued with politics and favoritism. It is blatantly obvious to everyone that being liked is more important that merits. - Lack of career advancement: as an SDR, you are not developed to get promoted and this company has a tremendous track record of going out of their way to hire from outside the company for higher roles - typically people from other tech companies w/o direct relevant industry experience. - HR violations have seem to be more of a regular thing. - SDRs have no future here and are without respect. They are just meeting setters for field reps and pawns/scapegoats between the field team and the marketing team. - Morale among SDRs reaches new lows each month. Everyone is waiting their turn to leave this revolving door.

Pros

-Overall great people that care about each other. Many of the work friends I have made throughout my career came from my time at Pure. All ages, all ethnicities across the globe! -Experienced CEO: Charlie is a very nice man who has a three decade pedigree of senior leadership in enterprise tech. He listens, cares about his employees and is truly doing what he can do to make Pure a top notch employer. Wish he was empowered by the Board to do more. -Swag: Pure spends oodles of $$$ on employees, customer and partner apparel and graciously hands it out at minimal to no cost. And this isn’t the cheap zip up sweaters...I’m talking Patagonia, Nike and other top brand names.

Cons

In my opinion, Pure is having serious challenges when it comes to scaling their organization beyond 3k employees. I broke this down into 3 main categories, but basically in summary middle management is the achilles heel of Pure. Fix your middle Mgt issues and you’ve got a real shot to become an iconic tech company. 3 Impediments to Progress: all interconnected - no hierarchy of importance. 1) GTM Leadership 2) Product Strategy 3) Diversity & Inclusion GTM Leadership - To be candid, Pure’s Sales Leadership is rife with nepotism, favoritism and lack of clearly defined organization structure and accountability. 1) Field Sales overhiring hiring practices to compensate for low % of plan to participation of field reps. Throw more reps at a productivity issue? That’s their strategy ... 2) Sales Enablement/Ops- Leaders more concerned with image and self promotion than empowering sales(across all levels) to produce higher levels of consistent output QvQ. Furthermore, the leaders of both orgs do not empower their individual managers to make key decisions , rather they accept company awards and show up in company training videos all to promote his/her own brands. Unprofessional and needs oversight. 3) Inside Sales: I think other reviews pretty much summed it up: ISO is a broken cluster of mismanagement: 3 Global VPs in less than four years and misalignment with field leaders = limited appreciation/respect for ISO. Product Strategy 1) Pure did not embrace the public /hybrid movement until market dynamics forced them to. Way back in 2015-2016, Pure was still preaching that public cloud was not part of the business plan. Fortunately, Charlie has pushed CTO/Founder to embrace a more SaaS/services business model, but similar to Nutanix it’ll take the public markets awhile to adopt the “new Pure”. 3) Diversity & Inclusion: This one hurts the most. Why? Because the #1 differentiation Pure has over its competition are the employees...the people. You would think a company full of scrappy people would embrace , encourage and seek out a diverse workforce. But instead, Pure Leadership has built up “employees resource groups or ERGs”- which serve as a conduit to showing external financial stakeholders that Pure is trying to address its D&I challenges. But like many tech companies, Pure has failed to truly achieve diversity and show inclusion in all the critical areas that are important to company growth: Leadership composition at all levels (mostly white males), non mandated employee reviews, no diversity hiring panel for key exec roles and no real $$ or action behind diversity efforts. Having a “part time D&I consultant” talk outdated ideals to make Pure more diverse/inclusive isn’t gonna cut it for the young female engineer looking for a shot in a male dominated org or the experienced black Sales VP who has a resume that moves mountains vs his white counterpart but isn’t connected well enough for Pure’s Sales Leadership to hire him. Q: If that person is good enough to become a Global VP at NetApp then why not Pure? Something to ponder...

Pros

Free snacks and beverages in the kitchen

Cons

It's a lousy leadership company suffering from favoritism and the lack of innovations First, the company stock has dropped almost twice since going public, and if you’d like to become reach on this stock, keep dreaming. The stock might go up, if the market goes up, and go down, if the market goes down. There are couple reasons for it - the company is developing a commodity product, which has no advantages compared to other enterprise storages, and a lot of work is outsourced to China, because there is almost no intellectual innovation in the product. By the way, the company is still not profitable. Second, the company performance suffers from favoritism. A lot of employees have been dragged by their former bosses from their previous companies. These favorites can do and say anything they want, and if you don’t want to get in trouble, keep low-profile for a year or two until you deserve your right to be heard. Most of the time these “favorites” keep mimicking activity in various meetings and don’t produce any real innovations. For example, I knew one engineer, who didn’t commit a single meaningful line of code for couple months and received bonus at the attestation for providing unquantifiable” services for the team. Please know that your career growth really depends on whether you get into one of the “favorite group” or not. It has nothing to do with your performance. For instance, I remember that at the beginning of the year, a couple of Sr. Managers have been promoted to Directors. Both of them are, of course, the company veterans, and are famous with their ability to talk for hours about nothing. None of them, of course, couldn’t even write a more than two-page document or a one-page-length schedule. They simply could not focus on a single task if it took more than 15 minutes. To me, they are both useless for the company, but the VP loved them for their ability to say smart things in the meetings, and they got their promos. Third, be careful, as some people have personal relationship at work. At the beginning of the year, one manager from sales was fired due to inappropriate conduct with his direct report during the company ski trip. However, another manager from their HW division regularly spends time, including overnight time, with his direct report on a ski resort and is able to get away with it. He even got his promotion this year (see section about about favoritism got his promotion this year (see section about about favoritism got his promotion this year (see section about about favoritism). Fourth, the HR is a joke. They spend all time doing different surveys and talks, like “how can we make your life better?” or “tell me who makes your life harder.” Many employees use them as a way for revenge, because the HR never verifies anything. They just meet with victims of gossips and try to implicate them what they may have never done… I’ve never seen a company in my life, where people were complaining so much about each other. HR, which encourages such behavior, is one of the biggest reasons of the problem. Fifth, the hiring process favors friends of the current employees. To get hired you need to pass several coding interviews, where you’ll be given a task. The interviewer is trained for a single task that is taken from a special pool of tasks, and the interviewer can never change it. The pool of tasks is known and rarely changes, and all company veterans/favorites know how to get access to it. That’s why a lot of new hires, who came by invitation, pass the interviews without problems, because they knew all tasks before the interview. Now here is the story of my employment. I worked for a man who couldn’t pull the trigger on a project, ever. I would bring him a request with all the supporting documentation. He would ask me to rerun it. When I came back, he would want it rerun again, and again. It was like an endless doom loop of frustration. I could never get him off the dime. By the time he approved it, the opportunity was lost, and he would blame me for missing it. It was utterly dispiriting. VP and director level managers didn’t have enough confidence to lead at their level. The boss I mentioned at the start was like this. He couldn’t decide because he had no faith in his decisions. The leadership was disorganized. I’ve worked with some hard-driving, capable leaders who hamstrung themselves by never getting organized. I reported to one leader like this. Their words and actions eroded trust, even with their supporters. You could never count on them. They didn’t hold people accountable—especially themselves. If a leader avoids responsibility and won’t hold their team accountable, they’ll shipwreck the organization. Accountability is essential! Also, my boss enjoyed creating dramas. Probably, it gave him feeling of personal significance, because every problem was a huge issue for him. He could rant for hours about how everything around is imperfect. Of course, he never bothered to notice that he himself didn’t really bring any real value for the company.

Pros

Great benefits Flexible schedule Diverse team

Cons

Too much favoritism Does not allow for a good work life balance

Pros

Lots and lots of food

Cons

- Nepotism - Inconsistent Policies - Favoritism - Lots and lots of food + 12 hour shifts = gaining lots and lots of weight

Pros

Good products, good vision of the market and setting the agenda. Many talented people, some not so much. Enthusiasm of employees, customers, partners. Great focus on customer support experience (hence the customer enthusiasm).

Cons

The 'Puritan' culture has some genuine merit or intent, however there are individuals and/or areas of the company where the exact opposite of that culture is exhibited. This is not a tiny population, it is quite prevalent. In some ways it is rather cult-ish. Arrogance abounds, as does blatant favoritism. While setting the agenda for the early market, much of that has now evaporated to a more crowded market, and while that is a natural progression of a market there is still a sentiment that all things orange are awesome and all things not are not.

Pros

Most of the company still hires for culture fit, which is why the culture hasn't turned super corporate since IPO. They do a pretty good job of recognizing employees that aren't just top sales guys or engineers. A lot of supportive management who seem to have your best interests at heart.

Cons

There's a lot of dead weight employees that, because they have been there from the beginning, are still there, even though they provide no value. There also seems to be a fear of taking action on management, even after concerns and complaints have been brought up about them. There's definitely a favoritism among the employees who were there before our massive growth and IPO. It seems that the execs try to make everyone happy and in doing this, important decisions aren't made or the big picture of the decision isn't considered. Also, they changed benefit providers at the beginning of the year and it sucks. Don't get me wrong, the HSA contribution that Pure makes is ridiculously generous but the actual provider is terrible and I've had a terrible time and experience with them.