Datadog Reviews

Code quality is quite low. Many, if not most systems at Datadog were built by one-man "teams" of engineers, often as hack-day side-projects, rapidly launched to production well before they were ready. Applications are almost never built in a "normal" way and there are whole applications without a single test. As a consequence systems break frequently and no one even knows how they're supposed to work. As a competent developer, you'll probably notice this in your first two weeks, but you'll also soon discover that there are many sacred cows at Datadog, and despite their obvious deficiencies, the design of these systems is largely non-negotiable. Most of your work will consist of a constant barrage of surprisingly crude devops changes just to keep the thing running. For many teams, most work is unplanned and very stressful because it's done in response to outages. (we have 3 or 4 outages every day, so half your day will be spent working on "urgent" problems) Backend engineers also participate in the on-call rotation, which ends up being once every 4-6 weeks and lasts for a week at a time. You will be responsible for 90% of the systems, even though you know nothing about them, and because everything is mostly broken, you will be paged every hour. Also you will get to experience the joys of working with an international team, where because almost every change at Datadog results in an outage, the developers in France will consistently wake you up at 4am every morning. The company has grown rapidly, but management has not kept pace. Team leads have no experience in leadership, do no planning and make irrational, heavy-handed decisions. Concerns are not taken seriously and you'll be treated like a junior engineer regardless of your prior experience.

This was a toxic place to work especially for minorities. They are currently getting rid of most people of color in the company so if you are a minority don't bother applying they don't want you. If for some reason you do get hired don't expect your tenure to be long. They only brought you in to satisfy the labor requirements they will find a way to get rid of you. This is a typical tech company where white men rule the roost. Expect to be harassed, body shamed, blamed for everyone else's mistakes. The rules are different for black/brown non Asian minorities vs white and Asian people. The good people there are hard to find anymore since this has become a company of every man for himself so don't expect anyone to get your back. Be prepared to have your work scrutinized more harshly than your peers and expect to see all the women acting like damsels in distress in order to make themselves look superior even when they are inexperienced and undeserving of their job title. In fact expect the undeserving to get pay raises and promotions while you get blamed for their inability to do the job. There was talk about doing unconscious bias training which sounds great but when you fire or force out all the minorities what is the point?