Cvent Reviews

1) Software engineering sweat shop -- 45-hour minimum work but 50-60-hour weeks are not uncommon. 2) Cvent is cheap. They often pay way below market rate for various positions. Benefits are so-so. If you work in a satellite office and they wish to fly you to HQ, they will not pay extra to fly you out Sunday night so be at the airport Monday morning by 5 am to catch your flight. They sometimes will make you share a hotel room to save money. If you give notice they will not pay out or let you take accrued PTO if carried over from last year. They provide lousy monitors, underpowered computers, and torture devices disguised as office chairs. 3) A frighteningly incompetent middle management -- What type of employee would stay at a company that pays below market rate (see #1 and #2 ) and expects your first born? The type that can't find work anywhere else. This results in a number of truly useless individuals who've stayed at the company for years and rose to the ranks of middle management. 4) Command and control structure bolstered by title inflation -- if you think you're going to come to Cvent and enjoy a collaborative environment where ideas and designs are chosen on their technical merit and you have the ability to make a difference -- think again! This is a place where if someone cannot justify their bad idea rank will be pulled. And there is a lot of rank -- titles and promotions are handed out like candy to those employees who are connected. Middle management types mentioned in #3 love this arrangement. 5) Scrum used as a weapon -- this place obsessives over scrum points, burn-down charts, and KPIs. Delivered code comes second. 6) Terrible code base drowning in technical debt -- as mentioned in at least one other Glassdoor review, Cvent's core codebase is laughably bad. I don't think anyone at the company has ever taken a software engineering course or read Code Complete. Cvent has dozens of Architects, Senior Architects, Senior Principle Architects (see #4) but apparently, they do very little architecting. 7) Equally bad infrastructure -- in the fall of '16 a single hard drive failure took down the company's entire internal infrastructure. Approximately 1200 employees couldn't get any work done for 5 hours. I guess they've never heard of RAID or hot-swappable. Incidents like these make sense when you read the Forbes article with the Cvent CEO saying "Cheap is the new religion". 8) Mandatory IQ/personality tests for existing employees -- this one speaks for itself. Employees who refused the test were told they'd be fired. Management claims the test was for establishing a baseline for future hires and would not affect existing employees. I'd like to believe this but why did they ask employees to sign their names on the test? 9) Recently bought by Vista Equity -- do some googling and you'll find out what happens to companies that have been bought/gutted by Vista Equity. It's not pretty. 10) In a nutshell this company has no culture, no work/life balance, very little integrity, and limited career opportunities unless you thrive in a Machiavellian environment.

First of all, beware of the HR reviews claiming to be in a technical position - these are for misleading prospective employees wanting to join the company and an attempt to offset the negative reviews. As a software developer you can usually tell the difference between something written by HR and some in development. 1) Work life balance is non existent. 40 hour weeks are generally frowned up even if you meet all your deadlines, etc. If you take the job, be prepared for 50-60+ hrs per week. 2) Regardless of what office you work in, you will constantly hear from upper mgmt things like “where’s the energy?” and “you guys need to talk more”. Not sure if they realize this, but writing code, debugging/troubleshooting takes concentration. It’s just another level on which mgmt attempts to manage each employee. This gives a whole new meaning to Service with a Smile. 3) Architecture is a joke. For a company that has more architects per capita then you would think that the applications would be architected in a way that makes sense and really helps the company achieve true SOA in their applications. All there is here is a bunch junk spewed out by people who rose to the level of architect simply by staying at the company for several years. The approved technologies by the architects is a joke. If you are involved in a new project, you may have to look outside the “approved toys” section in order to build the application efficiently, securely, etc. 4) Access controls for systems/tools makes no sense. Admins in charge seem to want to make things as difficult as possible for development to get things done in a timely manner. My advice is to push your way through those roadblocks and be persistent. Never be afraid to question what you think is not right or doesn’t make sense to you. 5) Everything is monitored by Big Brother (Cvent). Be careful about what you say/do while your in the office/on the network. 6) Many managers here like to play favorites. Regardless of your productivity, if you are not liked ( you question things, have an opinion, disagree with other members), then you will be put on the s-list. Normally, this would be an amusing thing but since your life could be made a living hell, most opt for just going along with the flow - being truly subservient, which is kind of frieghtening to witness. 7) If you have any ambition at all of climbing the ladder based on performance alone, then this is not the place for you. You will definitely have to play the office politics game.