Q&A With Qubole Employees

Semi formal should do. There is no dress code.

They are ok with casual dress. Wear a jeans and T shirt.

There is no social life.

Fun.

There is no work life balance for some and too much for those who are milking the system.

The technical platform is fun to use and there used to be cool new features introduced.

Generally enjoyable. Exit procedures are hellish.

Hectic.

Only best part was the opportunity to work on a fun technical platform which the product is.

They take you out for a day of community service as though you have done a crime.

The platform has a lot of potential, it is fun to use Qubole, so it should be growing pretty fast. I don't think they fare well in the banking sector and sectors which are particular about security as the product does not have Kerberos or any of the security features.

It was not a trustworthy place. All the extra hours I put in was a waste.

There is no feedback process, there is only complain process. You have a bad day, feel irritated about any colleague, you can dump that load on any higher up and you will get patted on the back for the feedback. The veracity of your complaint is never checked.

There is a complaining culture in Qubole. People who complain (falsely or not) get leverage over those who don't. Eventually all that is left in Qubole are people who milk the unlimited vacation system and complain about other hard working people.

There used to be a false sense of security at Qubole because they shield information from older employees and create a bubble of belief that the company is doing pretty well. But they are firing productive people constantly from very critical job roles, like they are always looking for ways to cut cost.

Unlimited vacation, but this is a hoax. The tricky employees milk this system, the sincere ones work like horses, but get fired later on and never get paid for the untaken vacation.

The benefits and competitive with other start-ups in the valley. A unique perk will be they reimburse coffee or juice or lunch or dinner bills if those are done as a group of employees. When I was there, there was a happy hour every week. They have an in-office beer tap.

Open office.

There are very few female engineering employees.

Qubole does not want current employees to talk to ex-employees because they don't want current employees to discover how they do exit proceedings. As long as they are ignorant about the exit proceedings ahead, the employees are sincere and work very very hard and their 'all-in' attitude is enjoyable to work with and you will also enjoy working with other such employees. Except when it comes to blame games, it is usually and normally an enjoyable morale situation. Managers should try shield lower levels engineers from even knowing the blaming that goes on between teams because that kills morale as every person has a justification about oneself. Try to improve your exit procedures rather than hope and aggressively prevent communication between current and ex-employees.

Engineering team is good, make support part of engineering team, allowing transfer of resources between the two from time to time, make the 2 teams work together closely.

Engineering team leadership is good,only problem is structure.The support team is lacking a good stand within the company, the support engineers are looked down as some kind of low skilled engineers and they are not included or glorified for any achievement, although they keep the sky from falling down on the entire company. This prevents the support team from hiring senior and super-skilled support engineers to the company and those who were there did not feel comfortable being looked 'down' upon. It is really hard to break the stigma that support engineers are subjected. One suggestion is - make support engineering team a part of the engineering team - allowing transfer of resources between the two and making the support and engineer team members work together as one bigger team, rather than blaming each other. Support is a purely engineer job, make their team report to the CTO. They shouldn't be put up to perform against pre-sales SAs whose main skill set is sales.

The interviewing was a good experience. Only the one question asked to me by my hiring manager was uncomfortable : "Have you faced gender based discrimination in a previous employment ?"

Be relaxed. The interview is not likely to be a tense process. Just review the fundamentals.

5 rounds of 45 minutes each.

A couple of solution architects , software engineers and hiring manager.