Engine Yard Reviews

3.0

32% would recommend to a friend

(29 total reviews)

Beau Vrolyk

85% approve of CEO

22% positive business outlook

Engine Yard has an employee rating of 3.0 out of 5 stars, based on 29 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an average working experience there. The Engine Yard employee rating is 22% below average for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

29 reviews
3.0
24 Nov 2015

Better but not perfect

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Relaxed atmosphere, smart people. The company has cleared house in the last while eliminating a lot of the excess management and the change of CEO will do the company wonders but there are still execs there slowing everything down. The move to containers and ditching the new platform are all good moves but should have been done a year ago if not longer. Things are moving in the right direction but it might be too late.

Cons

Might be too relaxed at times. Huge turnaround, can't seem to keep employees, firing other employees and asking them to come back a month later. Little to no HR, projects that go off on month long tangents before being cancelled. Project managers come and go so often lots of things left behind and left unfinished.

3.0
3 Dec 2015

Wait and see

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Bear in mind that all of this is based on what I experienced during my time there (over 4 years) prior to being caught in a second round of mass layoffs (which I'm actually -not- bitter about!). + Laid back culture that isn't nearly as demanding as some places + Managers/management actually seem to care about employees as human beings, not machines + Wicked smart engineers company-wide, all departments + New CEO has made good decisions on moving the company in a new direction + Long standing history in the Ruby community and lots of internal connections to people in that and other communities, and to people in other well known companies (e.g. GitHub, Oracle, etc.) + Just plain GOOD, solid people. I honestly enjoyed just talking to everyone I worked with. They were all stand-up, honest people doing good work and who didn't have a hidden agenda or try to play politics and/or games. (Note: this is on the "worker bee" level here, in lower to middle management there were a LOT of office politics happening, but my managers did a great job trying to shield me and the rest of my team from that crap)

Cons

The biggest problem with this company was that it totally *failed* to keep pace with changes in the "DevOps" ecosystem. Originally built on top of Amazon Web Services, EY management had a vision for an IaaS ("Infrastructure as a Service") agnostic system; for example, deploying on AWS for one project, then over on, say, Rackspace Cloud for another, then maybe on Windows Azure for a third - all of them with the same interface to the end-user, but managing the differences under the hood. This vision, combined with tons of technical debt due to the "ship it now" mentality over the "let's make sure this is maintainable and works" mentality, is what prevented the company from keeping up with changes to the general technology ecosystem. When EY was first on the scene with its automated PaaS product, a lot of the tools that developers at various organizations and on various teams take for granted today, didn't yet exist. This is where EY filled the gap, providing a great toolchain and workflow to provision and configure EC2 instances, MySQL (and later, PostgreSQL) databases, external storage volumes (Elastic Block Store) and so on. Then they provided a pipeline for deploying custom Chef code (configuration automation, see chef.io), and deploying their application(s) to the environments. Sadly, that basic tool set never evolved past that state. When Amazon released ELB, for example? Couldn't use it for years after its official release, and even then, had to be "turned on" under a special feature flag for the platform. Maybe you wanted to use RDS - too bad, go roll your own account at Amazon and wire it up that way. Perhaps you wanted to language other than Ruby - well, they eventually pushed super-weak Node.js support (they threw the entire process for research, building and future feature improvements on *ONE* engineer alone!), then even weaker Java support, and then dropped both. So umm...no? And this is a symptom of one of the company's major problems: management ADD. It was like the former CEO (nice guy, don't get me wrong, but not great in this respect) couldn't decide where to focus. Various teams were being told to stop on a dime and shift direction to this new shiny thing over here, and then THIS new shiny thing over here! This happened so frequently that nothing ever actually got DONE. All the while, the major product that had users and generated revenue, never got any significant updates or upgrades. All while that was happening, Amazon was building multiple separate tools for each of these - and other - uses, that developers could "pick and choose", wire them together as they saw fit. Things like Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Auto scaling (which we tried to do, but executive-level politics prevented), Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Continuous Delivery systems, ways to deploy your code through Amazon, Relational Data Store, Web Application Firewall(s), Authentication and Authorization management, and a slew of other major things that people wanted from Engine Yard, were being not only developed, but *released* and *improved* by AWS. Pretty soon, the question became: why bother with Engine Yard at all when, for the same price, or cheaper, I can cut out a middle-man and use Amazon's services directly? This led to multiple former customers cutting ties and reducing reliance on EY as a vendor, which of course caused major problems in reaching profitability for the company. They've recently hired a new CEO and cut a lot of costs with laying off a huge chunk of the company. They've also re-focused on Docker container management (an idea that was embraced by competitors long ago under LXC since Docker didn't exist at the time), but it might turn out to be too little, too late. If you're thinking about accepting a job offer here, my advice is "don't". Unless you've got another job lined up as a backup and can work remote (or otherwise won't have to move). You may not have a job in N months because of the poor decisions made over the years.

5.0
2 Sept 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Extremely intelligent and dedicated people work here developing cutting edge technology and providing superior customer service. There are not many places you find such talent.

Cons

Long hours but it's getting better. Working with cutting edge technology can be good and bad depending on your goals.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 29 Reviews

Glassdoor has 32 Engine Yard reviews submitted anonymously by Engine Yard employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Engine Yard is right for you.