MicroStrategy reviews

2.9

38% would recommend to a friend

(1,367 total reviews)
avatar

Phong Le

30% approve of CEO

34% positive business outlook

MicroStrategy has an employee rating of 2.9 out of 5 stars, based on 1,367 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an average working experience there. The MicroStrategy employee rating is 25% below average for employers within the Tecnologías de la información industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

1K reviews
1.0
Sep 4, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Well the benefits other than pay are slightly above industry average, especially the vacation.

Cons

The title should shed some light on how the company is doing. Suffice it to say I've been at MicroStrategy a long time and won't be here much longer. Let's start with the biggies: -Management is entirely top down, CXOs make decisions without any input and swing WILDLY between initiatives that completely conflict with each other vis a vis resources, time, and attention required. The end result is that nothing actually gets completed and everything released is half done at best. -Pay used to be below average for the area; it is now a joke. Most positions are underpaid a good 20-50%. One person I know left and got a 100% pay increase. -Management is comically petty at almost every level - take the title as a good example. We had layoffs in July that targeted a good half of the top performers and the five worst people in Support are still employed today. They weren't based on income or on performance (we were told the latter specifically by management, the former was found out), which means the only cause was "well I didn't like _____." -Work life balance used to be mostly okay, but about two to three years ago it just vanished all at once. Developers have to work crunch weekends or got terrible performance reviews, and Support started going on site visits with no stated hours per day and had to do 24/7 shifts for funsies. Also if you don't answer a call/text on the weekend, even if you're not on a shift, you get told off as "rude." -HR exists to defend the company and executives for lawsuits and absolutely nothing else. Anything you say to them will reach your managers. -The top execs of the company are just universally mean spirited and will effectively schoolyard bully people in large meetings as a sort of ritualized crucifiction. This is considered normal and "part of the job." Miscellaneous goofiness: -If you aren't sales nobody high up cares about you because you can't attach a direct dollar amount to yourself. This is masqueraded as "we're a data driven company." -Our new CFO left less than a year after coming on board, and had she stayed just a bit longer to make it over a year, she would have gotten 9 million dollars in vested stock options. She turned down NINE MILLION DOLLARS to not work another second at MicroStrategy. -MicroStrategy has more VPs than most derelict buildings have rats, so the actual structure of the company is completely bonkers. -There's some pasta left on the support floor that's rotted in the office. -The product has been dying for years as we keep losing market share, while the company brags about their terrible gartner position of "challenger" despite the fact that the company is over 20 years old in the sector. -Prior to layoffs, we had 500mil (half of our market cap) in cash and cash equivs. What to do? Ah yes, lay off roughly ~11mil a year in people, then buy a quarter bil of bitcoin and another chunk in stock buybacks. It's really just a madlibs of a company. -Most recently, pivot to cloud! Then lay off a ton of your best cloud people!

1.0
Jan 13, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Having an opportunity to work with the extremely talented and smart people that are left after the layoffs and mass amounts of voluntary attrition. The vacation plan and benefits are good.

Cons

Everything else...to include a complete lack of direction, no vision or go forward strategy, never ending change and turmoil at the top, no hiring except for more and more unnecessary VPs, barely any women in senior leadership roles, questionable decision making, and a complete lack of communication from the executive team aside from infrequent pointless all hands calls and long e-mails that don't address any of the issues that people are concerned about or the questions they are asking. Morale is incredibly low and is only getting worse. The people who are left are demotivated and overworked as they are picking up the slack from everyone who has resigned and left the company since the layoffs started back in September. There is no decision making power outside of the CEO's office and very few people, if any, have the ability to influence the direction, structure, or compensation for own their teams anymore. It is apparent that the CEO only appreciates complete agreement based on his latest "circle of trust". He doesn't listen to feedback from anyone who doesn't agree with him, not even from the high level executives that he hired to run various parts of the business that are only looking to implement best practices in their organizations. MSTR has never had a strong or well-rounded Education program for internal employees, but we were well known for our 6 week bootcamp training that resulted in the MCD (MicroStrategy Certified Developer) certification. All new technical employees received this training upon joining the company. This is now going away and there are rumors that it will be replaced by a one week bootcamp that will simply be a crash course in our products. It is bad enough that there is no formalized continuing education programs for technical or professional skills, but to eliminate the one big investment that the company was making in a large number of our employees to get them basic MSTR skills is incredibly disappointing. Our customers and partners are acutely aware of the dysfunction happening at MSTR and it is beginning to affect our sales cycles. Companies are starting to not want to be associated with us, candidates aren't interested in joining the company, and a large majority of the current employee base is actively looking to leave the organization. If I had reviewed this company even 6 months ago, my feedback would have been completely different. Unfortunately this seems to be consistent with the recent reviews and also the trend reporting. I hope that MSTR can turn things around however, it will take some drastic positive changes from the top and I've lost confidence that this will happen any time soon.

1.0
Dec 17, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There used to be a lot of potential. Good gym. Free Coffee.

Cons

Let's start with the CEO and work down. He is not only an arrogant person and horrible to deal with - but he surrounds himself with a bunch of "yes-men" [and 22 year old women] to convince him that he's brilliant and doing the right thing. The last 4 years have been full of failed endeavors that have nothing to do with our core business. We have probably spent several hundred million dollars on projects that haven't made a dime. Not to mention anyone put on those "products" was immediately promoted (read: costing more money) and then subsequently fired (when 20% of the company got laid off this year). The only stakeholder in any project is the CEO and that's not a way to create enterprise-grade software - You spend your entire day thinking about how to please "Mike" for your next demo when you know all he is going to do is bark for an hour in an aimless, mindless rant. He has no idea what he is doing right now. So - If you're in the business of having 0 talent, constantly sucking up, name dropping, taking credit for others work, and having a personal chef make all your lunches - then the executive team at MSTR is right for you! By the way - when the chef then brings the extra "scraps" from lunch down to the commoners it's just another sick metaphor for how this place is run.

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