Dialpad Reviews

Dialpad introduces itself as a cutting edge company that cares about technology and expertise. The picture on the box doesn't match its contents. Dialpad has a range of issues, but they stem from its biggest issue; the political games everyone is required to play to appease product management. If you are experienced, you'll quickly realize your expertise is not wanted, unless your advice is in lockstep with the opinions of the founding engineers. These engineers are extremely arrogant and are hostile to anyone who suggests a path outside of their pre-existing expertise. This results in an environment where the codebase is a stagnant mess, and those who are willing and capable of fixing it are scared of doing so, or even suggesting how one might do so, due to the fear of the political repercussions. The codebase is riddled with archaic code, forked libraries, and custom solutions where a simple open-source solution has been available for years or even decades. For example, while I was there they were trying to adopt Vue. They started down this path to attract new hires rather than to improve their codebase. Instead of trying to follow Vue patterns and progressively replace old code with new Vue components and patterns, a small group of engineering leadership hacked up a bunch of utilities and monkey patches to continue using old patterns in new Vue based code. They did this without asking for nor wanting any input from the rest of the engineering team. They then forced the use of these inventions while at the same time actively discouraging the use of Vue patterns in favor of the old ones. It's worth noting they also don't follow proper rest patterns, and often have single resource handlers that contain massive switch statements, mainly because of a custom ORM-like bit of kit they use for their frontend app's data layer. They claim it enforces REST patterns, which is a strange responsibility for a client-side library. They strung this thing together by extending backbone models and collections with a level of complexity that would make a kernel developer blush. It tries to do unnecessarily complex data management; fetching and syncing, even collection cursors. This results in all sorts of bugs and compromises. One could point out that much more complex real-time applications get by with much less code and complexity simply by using common solutions, but that wouldn't go over well for said person, lol. It's not the Dialpad way. The Dialpad way seems to be one of two things depending on who you are. One is that you need to stop concerning yourself with the difficult problems and leave it to the experts, even if you happen to be an expert. The other is to write something really complex that only you understand, then make everyone use it. No SPA or PWA here, as these concepts they believe to be unreasonably complex, which yes, is hilarious and ironic given what I've written above. The worse part about this is that CI is a nightmare and takes forever to run. Testing is a mess and most modern frontend tooling doesn't work properly without modifications. It also means that production deployments are unnecessarily stressful and dangerous. That said if you are looking for a paycheck, can check your passion for quality engineering at the door, and can be a good yes person, then this is might be the right place for you.

Take your pick; smoke and mirrors or bait and switch. That pretty much sums up a Dialpad experience in a nutshell. During your interview: 1) We’re going public in 24 months or less (they’ve been saying that for years), 2) Dialpad Support and Sell features are unique/special, 3) Lots of SEs and support, 4) great culture and everyone helps each other out. What you’ll find post interview: 1) the company has an identity problem which means there’s no clear direction of where it’s headed (leadership tries to pop up new ideas/direction then pivots to something different. Attrition at the leadership level contributes to this also ), 2) jack of all trades; Dialpad excels at nothing, 3) IPO target gets continually pushed back, 4) revenue and growth are lackluster, 5) you’ll need to be in the inner circle to have any job security, 6) you’ll hear many lies being told by leadership, 7) if you have a deep technical question, expect SEs, Support, and Product to give you different answers or they won’t come to a verifiable answer at all 8) all of their competition is faster, more responsive to the market, and growing faster in revenue and funding, if private. Dialpad is slowing development and sticking to small and commercial business to try and churn and burn it’s way to reach $100m in revenue and hopefully get more funding, 8) when you start noticing someone not being as involved, then you know they’re getting pushed out. This happened to their CFO, CMO, CRO, and a number of RVPs and VPs within the past year. If you don’t have one of those titles, your exit will be immediate as layoffs come swiftly from what I saw among co-workers in any/all departments.