Zendesk Employee Reviews about "work life balance"

Pros

- The Product... such a great product and the company is very product focused - The culture. Everyone is real. - A lot of opportunity to make really good money.

Cons

Work/life balance... at least in Sales which is typically the case at every company.

Pros

Career development Annual budget for self development Flexibility and great work life balance Good compensation and benefits Really nice offices Care about their employees

Cons

I can't think of anything that would be actually relevant

Pros

Relaxed environment Always fun stuff happening throughout the week Great autonomy to the role People are super nice Food and drinks are great Workplace experience is amazing Exciting product and growth Work/Life balance is amazing and very flexible

Cons

I can't think of any cons to working here and I've been here for more than a year.

Pros

On our way to being the next Salesforce or Oracle but with better work life balance

Cons

too much change to keep on top of

Pros

Amazing people and making a genuine difference for customers. You’re well looked after and a work life balance is promoted from the get go.

Cons

Huge amounts of change and shift in culture as organisation grows. It’s no longer a scrappy start up but an enterprise company and with that status comes a new set of challenges.

Pros

Medical insurance, dental insurance, ESPP Some pleasant employees if you work out of the Melbourne and San Francisco office. The rest of the global offices have some of the most unethical and moralless human beings I ever encountered. Work/life balance is great if you work out of the Melbourne and SF office. Anywhere else you need to take conference calls at the wee hours.

Cons

Weak 401k No bonus plan for low-level employees Some pleasant employees if you work out of the Melbourne and San Francisco office. The rest of the global offices have some of the most unethical and moralless human beings I ever encountered. Work/life balance is great if you work out of the Melbourne and SF office. Anywhere else you need to take conference calls at the wee hours.

Pros

Zendesk has extremely solid work/life balance and the managers I've worked with are flexible with working hours. The work I do is solid and there aren't unrealistic expectations for productivity.

Cons

Overall the future is cloudy - upper management hasn't been able to make its vision clear at all, and the compensation/promotion process is opaque. Projects get re-scoped halfway through and sent off in a different direction.

Pros

Great company to work for. Lovely offices in a great location. Management style is very nice and allows you to challenge yourself to progress all the time. The culture of the company leads to great teams and a great working atmosphere. Excellent work / life balance too which is very important for me. I can see myself working for Zendesk for a very long time if things stay as they are.

Cons

There are no cons to working at Zendesk that I can see so far.

Pros

People are friendly and there is a strong, almost familial culture. In that vein there is a strong respect for family and workhat vein there is a strong respect for family and workhat vein there is a strong respect for family and work life balance relative to other tech companies in the bay area. While it varies by group working hours in the office typically start at between 9-10am. And most people leave between 5-6pm so there are very few folks around past 6:00pm. Compensation is generally lower than at other tech firms. But it is probably fair given the number of hours worked.

Cons

CHALLENGES MOVING UP MARKET The company is going through a challenging transition as it moves from its early success being a help desk software platform for startups and smaller businesses to one that is now focused on moving up market and selling customer service software to larger more established businesses. Zendesk has promised Wall Street that it will achieve $1B in revenue by 2020. This is an aggressive goal that has put a lot of short term stress on the business (and correspondingly its employees) each quarter as it figures out how to live up to the promise. To achieve $1B in my mind means fully committing to moving up market and selling to enterprise buyers. This has been hard for the company as it is requires the company to be the type of business that the original Zendesk was trying to disrupt. As Mikkel the CEO writes in his book Startupland "we shared a healthy disdain for the traditional enterprise software sales model. The big platforms, the expensive salespeople with the expense accounts, the semireligious conferences, the PowerPoint software, the locked-in relationships". This move up market requires that requires the company to change a lot of what made it successful early on. The company needs to build new muscles in sales and marketing to support enterprise which requires new skills, new processes, and often times new people. This has resulted in multiple reorganizations (or "evolutions" as they are now calling them) in sales and marketing that have been fairly disruptive and caused a lot of angst for people in terms of having clear roles and responsibilities. LACK OF URGENCY The work life balance mentioned as a pro also means that the company does not move as quickly as other places. And as a result there is not a lot of "urgency" within the company to get stuff done quickly. This can be frustrating for those who do have urgency and are trying to push others to have the same mindset. NOT A DATA/ANALYTICS CULTURE The company has historically not been one that relied significantly on data/metrics to make decisions. It's always done things by the seat of its pants and is not particularly buttoned up. As a result there is not a strong data/analytics culture within the company and the corresponding data/analytics infrastructure including reporting and systems reflects that. So often the data required to make decisions is not available, incomplete, or simply inaccurate. The company is trying to change this but it requires a lot of work to undo years of neglect. So for folks that want to have reliable data to make decisions Zendesk may not be the best fit. DIVERSITY & CAREER ADVANCEMENT While the company has initiatives around diversity the company is still not very diverse at the senior and mid level management positions and there seems to be a bias for younger employees. This seems to be ingrained into the companies recruiting culture. In fact two of its most senior and long tenured minority Vice Presidents just announced their departure October 2017. The company does have a history of promoting young employees who are willing to work hard and go the extra mile. There are at least 3 VPs that have been promoted in the last year that are under 30. Many of the older senior leaders are being pushed out.