Now, on to the negatives.
* Culture of dishonesty: If a customer finds a major bug, it may be brushed off and fixed silently. If engineering finds a bug that affects customers and they don't know, it's silently fixed and no credits/notice is given, even for core functionality. Staff do not want to trust customers with the truth and feel that they can better earn their trust by hiding problems from them by lying. Staff may also not trust themselves for repercussions of their own bugs.
* Fishy use of J1 VISAs for full-time, non-intern employees from abroad. You are quite likely reading this as someone outside of the US and may not know what a J1 is. If you don't, please read up on J1 VISAs. ThousandEyes will generally submit an application for an H1B VISA. Unfortunately, the process sucks and many people don't get accepted. What's sketchy is that they follow it up with a J1 VISA application if the H1B VISA doesn't go through. H1B is for workers, J1 is very explictly for interns at most. ThousandEyes had had one intern in all of my time there, the rest were clearly full time employees. The J1 VISA employees at ThousandEyes often have to fill out forms saying what they learned. These are things they probably learned ten years ago. While immigration is difficult in the US, I say this because you need to be aware that there is a chance (I am not a lawyer) than if you are sponsored on a J1 VISA for a non-intern position in ThousandEyes, you are doing something illegal (as would be ThousandEyes). Furthermore, there's a chance that ThousandEyes, if busted, might send you back home with a very difficult time immigrating in the future. Maybe in this political climate that will never happen, I don't know. But new recruits are not told this as far as I know, and you should know because it may be a huge risk. If you are from abroad, please read up on US immigration, J1 VISAs, and H1B VISAs. One last thing. If you do come in on an H1B VISA, salary information is public. You can go online and search for the salaries of many of the ThousandEyes staff. Maybe you don't want to do this, that's fine. But you should be told because it is public and thus no secret. You can do the same thing for Google, Facebook, etc, if you want to.
* Not a very organic culture, discussions about the product often end up being told to go to off-topic areas. In particular, the VP of engineering will shoot down these conversations, but several in engineering are not very open minded. All in all, the culture at the dining table is pretty good, but when it comes to working it's not always the greatest mix.
* The engineering staff is a huge mix of cultures. Most people speak English as a second language. This is very nice for diversity, but there are some obvious communication difficulties. All and all, cultural differences seem to be handled quite well. I've made some great friends there. Still, communication can be difficult.
* Sales is in the same office and rarely stays around engineering for happy hours and such. There's a little bit of tension over their distance.Sales rarely stick around for lunch. Their turnover rate is very, very high (many gone in 3 months).
* While this may or may not be exactly true, many of the engineers have more education than experience. While this is not a problem in and of itself, there are some narrow minds there that take a while to open up. I would advise that they emphasize more on experience in the future, rather than pulling in PHD students without professional experience.
* After working around the product for eleven months, I was not impressed with it. It's helpful, but seems stop-gap. Feel free to open up a trial account and see for yourself how you feel about it.
* The product is very enterprise focused. You have to buy it in one-year contract terms. This upsets me because I'd like to use the paid product, but there's almost no way I'm going to sign a year-long contract to do that. You may or may not like enterprise-centric businesses, so keep in mind that in mind.
* All in all, it's the dishonesty that kills me. There are a lot of unhappy employees at ThousandEyes but they haven't left because of the difficulties in switching jobs over VISAs, or because they are in the greencard process. There are a lot of happy employees too, but I found that more of them had not had much prior work experience. It is my experience that there are many better companies in the area and in the US as a whole that you can work at. Places where the business is honest to its customers, where employees hear each other out, and where innovation is a bit more sensible. It's not a bad company, but it's not really good either. While there are many glowing reviews here, I recommend that you move along to a better place until there are significant changes at ThousandEyes. If some day they start openly sharing about their outages (and not other company's outages, which they use for publicity) and bugs, it may be a good sign things have changed. I do feel a bit attached and I like the company in many ways, but it has a long way to go, and unfortunately a lot of that work starts at the top.
