MicroStrategy reviews

Some other reviews on this site and some former colleges of mine have said essentially, “Sure, there are some problems here, but all workplaces have issue like this”. It is true, all companies have problems…but VERY FEW can possibly have as many as MicroStrategy. The biggest issue for me at MicroStrategy was the work environment. Pure and simple, the majority employees are not happy with their job there. There is a lack of motivation and passion for the work – almost no one has any interest in doing their job from day-to-day aside from appeasing their manager. This problem stems from a variety of causes, but in a large part is the aftermath of a massive round of layoffs in 2014. The company went from ~3500 employees worldwide to right around ~2000 over a year, many of these were laid off while the rest was due to subsequent attrition. A lot of the best people at the company abandoned ship during this period, leaving huge gaps in leadership and leading to numerous restructures. People talk openly about their job hunts and joke about who would be the last person left at the company. When I heard of friends leaving the company for other jobs, my disappointment at their departure was dwarfed by my excitement that they had been able to escape to somewhere better. There have been half-hearted attempts by management to improve the atmosphere, e.g. “Food Truck Fridays”, but the continued attrition and lack of real change has lead me to guess that they have concluded it is really not worth their effort to retain employees at this point. Benefits and compensation are less than competitive, as salary reviews will show. The majority of engineers are internationals on work visas, which is cheaper than paying competitive salaries to US software engineers. It feels like these international engineers are being taken advantage of – luckily many of them have moved on to places like Google and Facebook. The 401k plan is egregious. The company will half-match your 6% contribution (low compared to comparable companies) but read the fine print in the vesting timeline! A meager 20% vests after 2 full years there, and you have to be there for 6 YEARS for 100% vesting. Add to that that the plan is with Principal, a group notorious for high fees that eat away your retirement savings. Everything about the company of late feels like they are penny-pinching, from huge hassles submitting expense reports, to cancelling cell phone plans, to replacing forks and spoons in the kitchen with sporks (is this an elementary school cafeteria!?). Upper management is abysmal, as could be gathered from the CEO approval rating. No one has the courage to stand up to executives when they make terrible decisions, which is not surprising since most that have made a stand did not last long at the company. Many low-level managers are good people, but they are powerless to help their team advance their careers or protect them from nonsensical decisions and mandates from higher-ups. Good, hard workers are rewarded by piling more work on them. Your best chance at getting a raise or promotion is to say you are quitting (which, to be fair, seems to be pretty effective). On top of all this, the MicroStrategy product is profoundly flawed and is being outdone by competitors like Tableau at every turn. Keeping the product from becoming more and more obsolete every year takes the combined efforts of the entire technology department. The largest source of revenue is from support (this should say something about the quality of a product…) and from customers that have been invested for 10+ years that have put so much time and energy into maintaining the convoluted platform that they can’t bring themselves migrate to a better solution. It is truly a struggle to get excited about building and selling something that is just not very good. To anyone considering taking a job here, I’d strongly advise against it no matter the stage in your career. Look at rating trends and understand that many of the 5-star reviews are from current employees who were asked to write good reviews by management. To anyone currently working there, know that these problems are NOT normal and a workplace can be miles better. I’ve moved on and could not be happier to be at a different company. TL;DR – Work environment is miserable, management doesn’t care about employees, product is bad, don’t work here.

It is not at all surprising that this company with great potential has been marred by trouble after trouble in many directions. The now-infamous 2014 letter from Apex Capital to the CEO telling him to dock the yacht may have been spot-on but did not bode well for the rest of the company: Saylor came back with a vengeance and started micromanaging every nook and cranny of each product in the company's portfolio. This happens in many companies and the user that product management has to react to and satisfy is not only the customer but also the executive sponsors; but in the case of MSTR, these executives are a socially inept CEO that listens to noone but himself, a CTO that is even more socially inept than the CEO, with no technical acumen or leadership skills to speak of, and a string of yes-men (mostly men) from the CTO all the way down, that have time and again seen that the the key to survival in a company that did reorgs once a month at some point is never disagreeing with the CEO lest face, at best public humiliation over email, and at worst, termination. The company was run with no governance and internal accountability like an early stage start-up for many years and the efforts to rectify that were ham-handed at best. Paying a large sum for Agile Scrum management software, management tried to institute a time-recording system using that platform, raising the ire of many employees in the development ranks. Years and years of never having done real performance reviews and not having kept performance records, the company enabled senior director or VP-level people to directly grade hundreds of employees based on no feedback whatsoever from them or their supervisors; the effort to start performance management took off pretty much as a formality, where rankings and promotional considerations still continued to be based on factors other than real merit. When MSTR ventured into identity HR made colossal mistakes by stacking the senior management of that effort with non-technical product executives from security companies. And when all failed without a proper GtM strategy, they rebranded overnight into a security product, which finally fizzled out into an add-on feature for the BI suite. The bitterness from management mistakes and the executive rank's reactions to developments in a publicly-traded company results in very poor morale in the workforce and subsequently super-high attrition rates quarter after quarter. To HR's credit they tried every trick in the organizational behavior playbook: An employee council that tried to make employees feel empowered through anonymous surveys? Check. Super-high referral bonuses? Check. Happy hours? Check. Food truck free lunches instead of serving leftover food from the executive floor on other floors' kitchens? Check. But, the fact remains that most of the employee base is either looking for jobs elsewhere or scheming to rise. Another indicator of the poor health of the company is the vast divide between perceptions of success in different groups. Business Development or Engineering folks can be right in the middle of this misery (unless they are senior level folks that know how to play their cards right) while Legal or Marketing folks can be blissfully unaware of the fires going on among the development teams.