Pure Storage Employee Reviews about "manager"

Pros

Pure hands down has been the best employer I have worked with in the tech industry. They sort of renewed my faith in this industry as being a fun and adventurous career path, like in the days of yore. Before the tech industry became a toxic watered down stew. Local management (as in not director level and above) are typically great people and managers. This is rare for a company that is the size of Pure. I have dealt with worse managers for smaller companies. Employees, for the most part, are comfortable with talking with management about specific work related issues, processes, workflows, and so on. With full confidence that the discussions they have will be confidential and not retaliatory. You may get the same corporate side stepping response from some managers that you would expect but a good chunk of them will take your words and ideas and present them as examples or solutions to any specific pain that ails their team, the best way that they can. Company benefits are still better than most I have had in the past or have seen offered by other companies. (More on this in the Cons) Pay is ok. (More on this in the Cons) I also haven't worked for a company that has so many fun and smart people. No joke, some of the best minds in the industry work here. Job stability is great. It was pandemic proof (for the most part depending on position). It's a job that can totally be done 100% from home. Specifically speaking of the TSE role (regardless of tier). Whether or not you will be able to work from home depends on your position and manager. This is a grey area and you shouldn't look at Working From Home as a benefit here as nothing is certain, currently, on how this will all pan out in the future. Your expectation should be that you will still need to go to the office to work a job you can easily do from home. Pure often brings in 100% catered food or provides a budget through a food delivery service for those working from home to provide lunch. This has changed due to Covid but that isn't Pures fault. Office break rooms are usually stocked with drinks snacks, and other goodies to increase morale and make people happy. Food and beverage is one of the easiest ways to keep people happy and is a good investment for most companies who can afford it. These break rooms are also filled with arcade style games. There are other rooms dedicated to game rooms, where we used to play Smash Bros on the switch (until we all started working from home due to covid). Needless to say, there are a lot of positives. Even some I'm sure I didn't list here. However, you'll notice that I didn't give Pure a 4 or even 5 star rating. That's because the cons, though few they may be, are pretty big cons. So they will be descriptive. I want to be honest, so do not look at the cons as rants, they aren't. There is certainly far more pros than cons for working with Pure. I just wish the cons were smaller. The stock is going up and that makes me happy. RSUs are also often provided after annual reviews.

Cons

Pure has an identity crisis. They want case handlers to work in a way a 9-5 Monday-Sunday type company operates but we are a 24/7-365 operation. This means that any cases someone is assigned, they KEEP those cases (with the exception of Geo Location limitations). This creates frustration when you are off shift for the day or even the weekend and a case is updated by a customer and they decide to not reassign the case (which customers often ignore the manual reassign button on automated response when a TSE is off shift), only to come back into work with an angry customer because the case had not been touched until the TSE was back on shift. This is further compounded that customers often get angry when multiple TSEs are working the same case, as well. This creates a situation where support staff just can't win. So, as a TSE, you often monitor your backlog of cases while you are off work, looking for responses from customers, then making the judgement call if the case should be reassigned for the customer. Since every customer thinks their case is of the highest and absolute strictest of severities (regardless of the actual issue/scenario), you tend to default to just reassigning the case yourself (which is also restricted to a manager to approve). Pure needs to just come to terms with the fact that it is a 24/7 operation and cases will jump from person to person, depending on days off, sick leave, holidays. Speaking of Holidays, Pure is also a Global company, so Support staff in other geo locales will often have holidays in which the staff in Utah will need to pick up the slack for. Again, further compounding the identity crisis Pure has. I'd take a good 20 or so more staff from each Geo Location and put them in Utah than have entire teams that take whole days off leaving another team with the entirety of their workload. Overall, this is mostly a work/life balance. It used to be easier but now it's becoming frustrating. Speaking of work life balance. We used to have unlimited PTO. There was always a soft cap but it wasn't something you needed to worry about. So, when you look at Pure benefits and it says "Unlimited PTO" there is a huge asterisk there (figuratively). We now have to manage our PTO like any other company, making time off work for holidays, events, those with kids who have events, emergencies, mental health checks, burnout control, or anything else you can think that may take time away from work, those need 2 weeks approval from a manager. If you are within the "soft cap" it will usually get approved if there is enough head count. However, once that soft cap is hit, good luck and Pure is not opposed to using that against you when it comes to annual review. There is a separate Sick day PTO of 80 hours. Out of a year that has 8766 hours in it, 80 is certainly not enough, especially during a pandemic. They couldn't have picked a better time to make that change. There were people who abused this system but rather than reprimanding those individuals, everyone else who wasn't abusing it were reprimanded instead. Which is typical corporate mentality and behavior. This wasn't how Pure used to operate in the past (been here for about 4 years going on 5). This is due to outside leadership being hired who didn't know or don't care about the culture Pure had built. More on this later. There is zero guarantee that your shift or days that you work will be stable. There is a lot of communication within the upper management that can affect the schedule you work and it can happen on a whim, for you anyways, because nothing is communicated downward and is treated on a need to know basis. If someones work schedule is going to be impacted/changed/modified, that need to know basis is everyone involved whose schedules will be modified. That simply isn't the case. As stated in the Pros section, Pay is decent. I have made more money here than anywhere else. However, the pay is still below industry average and still below National Average, for the TSEIII role. This role is more than just taking care of the Flash Arrays and knowing how SAN works. This is a VMWare, Linux, Microsoft, VEEAM, Networking, Security, SysAdmin, that one obscure program no one knows about except for the one customer who decided to use it, or anything else Pure or the customers of Pure think we need to manage, type of role... and you are expected to know everything about these things (at least by the customer) like the back of your hand. You WILL work cases in which you are solving complex issues the customer can't solve themselves, for customers who make more than you a year, regarding software you have probably never work with, heard of, or troubleshot in your life, and you WILL resolve these in a timely manner. The amount of software, networking, and hardware knowledge you need to have or have the ability to acquire to be the "Jack of all trades" for easily warrants a higher pay scale as you move up the Tiers of support. TSEIII is not just deserving of a $90,000 to $110,000 a year pay, what you will be doing warrants it. However, you will most likely be in the $65k-$75k a year range. This has also impacted our training days. A Day we get once a week in which a single hour is reserved for us to learn things regarding our products, software, hardware, customer environments, freshen up knowledge we already have, purity changes, etc. Support staff uses this hour to work their backlog, mostly, now. This has resulted in knowledge becoming stale (since things change a lot) or staff simply not knowing certain things that they should/ought to know. Catching up on emails is certainly a chore that takes more time than it should, since we use gmail and gmail is terrible. Upper Management no longer consists of people who knew and loved the original Pure culture. We hired a lot of people off of the streets and the culture has been in a decline. From reduction in benefits to more egregious toxic behaviors coming down the chain. At Pure, it used to be more about how you worked rather than what you knew. You could move into a managers role if you were willing to put in the effort to show motivation to do so. Or move from a Customer Support Role to a Technical Role. That tag line "Corporate Clones Need Not Apply" that plasters the careers page is a relic of the Old Pure. Corporate Clones are who Pure is hiring for upper management and Upper Management never fails to wreck good things in exchange for investor satisfaction, regardless of company. The revolving door is real. There used to a Bottom-Up mentality but things have become very much a Top-Down situation. No longer can people go to Upper Management (this does not apply to local management) without fear of retaliation. Many people don't speak up when they disagree with a move from the C-Suite, or want to express alternatives. There is a "Yes" culture, where people simply say yes to changes rather than seek evaluation from people who will be impacted by said changes. Again, typical corporate behavior. The lower you are on the totem pole, the less you will know about changes coming your way. We used to have meetings with entire teams, talking about some of the ideas management wants to implement, we would address concerns or impart more ideas, then local management would report on that. We no longer do that. It's more or less "this is what's happening now. Changes will take affect in week" sort of deal. We have far too few support staff, for ALL shifts, and WAY too many sales staff. This means we are selling more and more arrays and other products, which is good. Last I checked, Pure hasn't been more profitable. This comes at a cost for support who is now dug deep in workload that is not sustainable with the current workload, which results in a LOT of burnout, missed cases, lack of availability, customer dissatisfaction, and the treatment of a highly professional and knowledgeable Support Staff as if they were working for a mass call center.. .a job you'd take in your young years to gain experience in the job market. This is bad. It makes sense to not solve every workload problem by throwing more heads at the issue but this is an issue that requires more heads, without argument. The idea is to streamline work and automate a lot of manual processing but the way pure works is at a snails pace (of course unless a director level or above wants something done and I can guarantee you none of them really care about the way support is handled. It's all about the sales and those dollar bills), so changes won't come soon, which creates this black hole of long term unsustainability and when the changes do occur, they will probably be implemented poorly due to hasty action coming down the chain. Micromanaging is on the rise, specifically for the TSEIII role. This is a role in which you will work hard cases, conduct long investigations, put together Action Plans, work with Engineering, take unorthodox cases that requires research and understanding, but you need to be able to do all of that, plus more, while maintaining an availability status. This availability status puts you in a position where you will be automatically assigned more work, regardless of what type of work you are already doing, take calls from customers/CS, or volunteer/voluntold to take escalated cases/phone calls. This interrupts your work that you already have and should be prioritized. Yes, you can get out of available when you get a high severity case or when you take a call but the expectation is that you are available. With the increase in case creation from customers and the small support staff, TSEs backlogs are becoming larger than the queue making it difficult to stay on top of things or worse... like desire to volunteer for additional work and help out. It's not uncommon, now a days, to sit on cases assigned to you while you catch up with what you already have, requiring you to work past your shift or, if you care enough, work on your days off. This, like most things at pure now, is made worse by the implementation of a minimum case assignment a day requirement. 6-10 cases a day doesn't seem like a lot but it is when those 6-10 cases can't be resolved in a day (like the vast majority of cases we handle in the TSEIII role) and you need to spend an hour or more on a single case due to the nature of it. If you start from 0, in a week you can easily have 20+ cases in your backlog. In 2 weeks, over 40. Assuming you didn't close any of the cases (which is possible, depending on the case). You can easily lose track of where a case, where an investigation is, communications from customers, and so on if you don't implement good case hygiene. I can tell you right now, good case hygiene is becoming a fossil due to the shear lack of attention any one of us can give to a case, now. Pure, like most modern companies, is embracing self destructive Woke politics/policies which pulls people in opposite corners intentionally. I'm not gonna go into what I believe (and what I believe may actually surprise you despite reading what I said above) but you will not be able to express yourself in the same way, or at all, if you do not align with Pures Political opinions. This creates hostility among some people, even though the vast majority of us get along just fine despite our differing opinions, the few who don't often bleeds over to those who do get along. Makes for a toxic work place. Gone are the days that work was just work. Now we need to be fed everyone's political opinion and the downside to that is you only get fed one flavor because any and all other flavors, regardless of how innocent, are banned, frowned upon, or will get you fired. It's best to just not talk politics or find people mature enough and adult enough who can handle a conversation with someone who may not agree with them. Good luck, Pure isn't making an effort to hire people who mentally prepared to have their world views challenged. This is not a rant. These are absolutely POSITIVELY large concerns I have working at Pure. I've been here long enough to see a lot of the change happen. I have worked with employees who have been with pure, essentially from the start, quit over these specific issues and I don't blame them. Though I still have a mostly positive outlook, I need to be honest in the cons.

Pros

Top management was great. No problem to talk to them.

Cons

However, I had to work with my direct manager, not top management. Pure had daily status meeting called standup. I did not get any feedback on what I was doing for my assignment in daily meeting. But after 3 months, I got a notice of discharge (got fired). I had been in industry as a software engineer for more than 25 years in US. I had great reviews from all other companies but got fired in 3 months at Pure. If I was working in a way that was not satisfied or OK with my manager, he had many ways to stop me as we had to give status for previous day and plan for today in daily meeting. As a very Sr Developer, I learned a lot about manager's expectation from many former companies. All of my previous experiences might not be inline with Pure's culture. But manager had responsibility to tell me the culture of the company so I could work inline with his expectation. Very bad, no communication to me. It was like a project leader, not manager. Now, I'm in problem to get a new job as many companies do not even want to start interview process after knowing I was at Pure for such short period of time. 2 companies canceled offers after knowing my status. I was not laid-off, but fired. So, if you are a seasoned developer, you should be very careful when you try to accept an offer from Pure, unless you really want to take a risk. If you are a new grads, that will be fine as you know nothing about what is the right way in developing software. If you are a Sr developer, you may be in trouble because you may be working in a way that you think it is right but manager may do not tell you his expectation. At the end, you may be fired like me. I'm not saying that every manager at Pure is like my former manager at Pure. But, you never know you will have a manager like I had at Pure.

Pros

Good snacks Good benefits and compensation

Cons

Managing culture is very far off from being fair. The entire manager level is controlled by Indians and has a strong favor on ones who present themselves with fancy speech and acting active. The factor that managers use to judge you isn’t much related to what you’ve done, but mostly on how hard you present yourselves. Engineers are nice and I have very good relationship with a lot of them. Multiple senior engineers told me to get a good impression and review from manager, one needs a long fancy speech in standup that takes at least over 2 minutes where manager usually say things like “let’s limit standup to 45 seconds so it doesn’t take too long”. Obviously managers like those who seem to be busy and outstanding to the higher managing level, rather than those who just work. Indeed these two types don’t necessarily conflict but if you just focus on work but not dressing yourselves with fancy words, you’d be in danger soon. In other words, engineers are just steps for managers to claim higher on their career ladder. The worst part is, the company fire employees frequently. The strategy is they give out big package to attract good candidates, and have very poorly mentorship and ramp up process. Once you are in they want you to contribute immediately without much helpful guide to ramp up. Shortly after if you don’t meet the expectation you’ll be put in pip and there’s no out from that. I’ve been in Pure for a year and hearing people being let go monthly (just from people I know, I’m not even a social nor gossip person). General cons are like WFH is strongly un-encouraged, care a lot about presenting yourself in the seat, too much cross team dependency, often structure or scope change. Be careful when you are considering this company, make sure you don’t mind having to social a lot and work on getting everyone in the company know about you.

Pros

Culture, customer first, no micromanagement Room to grow and be promoted Competitive Salary Unlimited PTO Company parties/getaways $4500 a year deposit into HSA Fund Insurance is paid for Money given each paycheck to cover phone bill Awesome Work Environment, standing work desk Massage Chairs Awesome break room, Pac-Man, Killer Queen, Pinball, fully provisioned with snack and drink, and sandwiches, all free. Catered breakfast Tues/Weds Catered Lunch Mon/Weds/Fri Weekend Differential Pay 2nd/3rd Shift Differential Pay Amazing managers who care about your workload and how you are doing Management team where your words are heard and changes are implemented Probably more but can think of anymore

Cons

None, occasionally dealing with a hot customer or pressure from sales team You need to be competent and a hard worker

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). 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

My manager was very open to what I wanted to do and my skillset and put me at the perfect position for me. Very little friction and I was able to make substantial contributions very fast while expanding my knowledge about the product. I was quickly put in charge of a project where I feel valued and my skills useful.

Cons

It is a very fast paced environment and priority get reassigned regularly. This can lead to frustration if the project you're invested in get postponed.

Pros

- Love the field teams -Love the products -Great coworkers

Cons

- INSIDE Sales MANAGEMENT! You need to be careful. I've never been to a place where management is far more immature than the workers. This inside sales management team is a huge roadblock to career promotion and creates high stress - low return situation for the employees. You will battle for time off with an 'unlimited PTO' policy. You will deal with false rumors being spread by your immediate managers (things you have said in confidence) You will be given more tasks than help You will not be trained and expect to perform day 1 regardless You will deal with bias team management. Certain teams have different rules and benefits over others. You will fight a fresh battle with your ISM every day you walk.

Pros

- informal company culture - great colleagues - amazing office and snack program in the office - company with high potential for growth - big focus on work life balance - very flexible managers

Cons

- perks for employees can be enhanced (meal vouchers, cafeteria system)

Pros

no reason specifically in emerging region

Cons

Not recommend for anyone; no career path and only politics with managers

Pros

Free lunch M - W - F Free Breakfast T - TH Unlimited drinks and snacks in the pantry They pay for your monthly phone plan They give bonuses when company is earning well They give extra bonus for good performance They provide CIGNA medical and dental card for you and your family They provide you with Restricted Stock Unit and Stock Options as well They increase salary every year Managers are great with people They listen to you when you have roadblocks in your career They help you reach your goal People are mostly friendly and nice

Cons

I cant think of any