good company - Senior TSE Hortonworks Employee Review

Team atmosphere was great. Free lunches. Everyone was very collaborative.

Merged with Cloudera and the culture changed.

Interesting and exciting technology that is poised at the forefront of a wave of expansion. Definitely on the cutting edge and far from being commoditised. Also, there are many talented employees working at Hortonworks, including many of the core engineering group that originally developed Hadoop at Yahoo. In this respect, it's THE place to be.

At first I thought it was just the normal growing pains of transitioning from start-up to a public company that is striving to serve enterprise customers. Now I'm beginning to think what's happening here is insidious and will bring the company down if someone doesn't act in a timely manner. Here's the scenario: leadership at the very top exhibits an explosive burst of temper down the management food chain. Then the top few levels of leadership begin pointing fingers of blame at one another. This causes massive fragmentation and in-fighting--just at the time when we should all be pulling together to accomplish something that none of us can accomplish alone. This must stop or the company will be paralysed, unable to move forward. The culture of blame and infighting is extremely dangerous and damaging. I love the technology and I'm excited about the opportunity, but in a basic SWOT analysis--what I've described here is our greatest weakness and our biggest threat. I hope executive leadership and the board can fix this.