Dgraph Labs Distributed Systems Engineer reviews

I'm Manish, the founder of Dgraph Labs. At Dgraph, we take people very seriously. We are building a rocketship culture. A culture, where we reward our performers and ensure that every team member can be counted upon. We have built a positive, performant culture -- with the positivity coming from trust in each other's abilities. A culture that is unparalleled in other companies I’ve seen. Building this culture also means sometimes letting go of folks who are not performing. I’ve personally been in teams where the entire team has to carry the weight of a non-performer — and that’s not fun for anyone. While all startups strive to be lean and fast, at Dgraph, given the high caliber of our engineers and the complexity of our product, the bar is high. This review, like all typical 1-star reviews, is born out of anger — most likely due to an employee who felt that they were good, and indeed were perhaps good for a typical startup, but were let go because of not being a fit at Dgraph. I’ll start by agreeing with the review of multiple timezones. Our team is distributed among the US west coast and India. And that means, the overlap hours are small — so both sides have to put extra effort for collaboration. We balance this out by keeping mornings free for India folks and evenings free for US folks. The overlap happens early morning US -- late evening India -- the mix was chosen by the team, works well for the cultural habits -- Americans prefer early mornings, Indians prefer late nights. Now, in other companies, they would make the US team do the core work, while the "trivial" work gets offshoot to India. That’s not how Dgraph works. At Dgraph, we are all working together. So, a US engineer and an India engineer get to work on the same Dgraph core, with work being distributed based upon their “abilities”, not their “location.” And we take pride in building that culture. This review questions the caliber of our engineers — “junior engineers who don’t know what they’re doing, and older, smarter folks who have left”. That is so far from the truth. Dgraph is an open-source company. We believe in transparency. Our engineering is not “hidden” behind walls. Instead, most of our code is open-source, and even our proprietary code is source visible. This means all of our engineering happens in public. So, that doesn’t leave a lot of chance for BS. Dgraph is the #1 Graph DB on GitHub, and the only native Graph DB to have been Jepsen tested — that in itself is sufficient to prove the high-caliber of our engineering. BadgerDB, not even a commercial product, has gained so much popularity in the Go language ecosystem and is close to 10K GitHub stars. Ristretto, a one-person project has become a popular cache in Go and has 2.5K GitHub stars. I mean, for a company of our size (and the funding level — Series A), we have more contributions to the ecosystem than companies well above us in the chain. [1] About Dgraph being a “sinking ship.” I just don’t know where that comes from. We are in a growing space — at the intersection of Graph DBs and GraphQL. Both are in their upward trajectory [2]. Dgraph has solid backers from Redpoint Ventures (investor in Snowflake), Bain Capital (investor in Mulesoft, Redis Labs), founder of Atlassian, and so on. We’re hiring like crazy right now — our team expanded 5x from under 10 people in mid-2019 to close to 50 people by end of 2020. There are no “massive layoffs” even during a pandemic like so many other companies had to go through — so I just don’t see any validity in this claim. About the claim that no-one will fund and the company will die in 6-months — what can I say, but just that, time will tell. Get ready to be so wrong in 6 months -- which would be on Mar 31, 2021, by my calculations. Regarding paying customers, we have Fortune 500 companies and top Silicon Valley companies as paying customers. I think the comment is really about the revenue — that Dgraph is “traded” at 200x current revenue. It is comparing a Series A startup, to a publicly-traded company where the valuation of a company is determined by its revenue. That lacks a basic understanding of how venture capital startups work. Also, when Dgraph did Series A, we had zero revenue (we do have revenue now). So, even this number is wrong — the number is in fact, “undefined”. And finally, about me, the CEO being “rude and not taking feedback.” That’s just not how I work -- I consistently ask for feedback to ensure we're not making bad decisions, consider alternatives and so on. That's the only way to be successful. At Dgraph, our core value is to have “Action over talk. Logic over feelings.” [3]. We believe good ideas AND bad ideas can come from anyone, irrespective of their rank. So, when an argument doesn’t have logic, it can get rejected — and sometimes that affects people’s feelings, causing them to think the other person is “rude”. There’s nothing really beyond that. We’re an action and logic-driven company, and that’s what keeps us building a solid product, keeps us enjoying time with our team, and keeps us excited even when we have to work extra hard to push a release. [1] https://github.com/dgraph-io [2] https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_categories [3] https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/dgraph-core-values-v20-05-31/1402