Databricks reviews

4.0

77% would recommend to a friend

(1,622 total reviews)
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Ali Ghodsi

91% approve of CEO

84% positive business outlook

Databricks has an employee rating of 4.0 out of 5 stars, based on 1,622 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Databricks employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the IT industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

2K reviews
3.0
Nov 1, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The product is great, and the quality of engineering is on par with places like Google. Moves really fast, obsessed with SWE productivity. Can make a big splash here. The concentration of smart, experienced people here is higher than FAANGs I’ve worked at.

Cons

The culture has taken a bad turn or two. There’s a lot of XFN infighting and backstabbing. Leadership outs people for confidentially reporting something. Lots of things get stonewalled instead of saying yes or no. It’s odd that with so many great people the culture can be this toxic, but it’s seriously the worst I’ve seen (and I’ve been in this industry for 25 years). As a SWE up to L6 you can probably avoid most of this, but the higher levels are like a kindergarten. Also, the company ignores WLB, perks, training, team building and basically all other factors that drive retention. The only things that are supposed to motivate you are (1) interesting work and (2) compensation, which is competitive. But there’s no investment in cohesion, growing people over time or improving the culture.

3.0
Aug 2, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great leadership. Best CEO ever (perhaps one of the only CEOs in the tech world who understands AI at full depth). Tech stack choices have been great and product works in the market. There was autonomy and healthy teamwork culture. The teamwork part is still there, but a lot of the company works top down.

Cons

Everything was great until an year ago. Lately there are these mid level managers who have pestered the system. Now me and my team just do the work and get paid. These mid level managers can be replaced by parrots (no AI needed). They just repeat the leadership messages. Keep themselves unavailable with beauracratic way of delegation. Overall the innovation engine has died out. Also, internal productivity is declining due to rampant hiring.

1.0
Feb 8, 2024

WLB is terrible

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Employees very smart Growing company, you get to learn a lot

Cons

WLB is terrible, expectations are too high

Viewing 1 - 3 of 1,622 Reviews

Glassdoor has 1,764 Databricks reviews submitted anonymously by Databricks employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Databricks is right for you.