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Barracuda Networks

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Barracuda Networks reviews

3.3

49% would recommend to a friend

(739 total reviews)
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Rohit Ghai

75% approve of CEO

38% positive business outlook

Barracuda Networks has an employee rating of 3.3 out of 5 stars, based on 739 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Barracuda Networks employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

739 reviews
1.0
May 13, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

It pays better than a fast food job... It's pretty easy to get hired if you have decent computer skills. No dress code.

Cons

Pay is lower than industry average. Technical support has become the dumping ground for the things that the engineering or development departments don't feel like dealing with. Constantly short staffed, so we are always overloaded with work. Training and documentation is a joke. Be ready to "support" new features or products after having them described to you for only 20 minutes the day before it is released. (or even after something is released, it's happened more than once) What little training or guidance less senior technicians get is the responsibility of senior technicians who are so over worked and over loaded that they can't do a good job of it. (we aren't allowed to call our selves technical support engineers anymore - we are now technicians) They will find any excuse to delay or deny a promotion. The only way to get a raise in the technical support department is to get a promotion. See above Con. The different departments are more like different rival companies in direct competition with each other and guarding their secrets. Very much a left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing situation. Different departments or products will have goals that are contradictory to each other. Systems that need to integrate with each other have developers that don't even know how the other system works leading to a complete mess of bugs, incompatibilities, and features that just don't work - and tech support is expected to "make it work" anyway. The cliques and needing to be part of the "in" crowd if you want to be taken seriously or paid attention to that other reviewers have mentioned is definitely a real thing. Most of the management staff doesn't really know how to be mangers. The different support offices have different competency expectations, so if you work in the Ann Arbor office don't expect any help from the other offices. I could go on for days...

2.0
May 9, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The location and parking are probably the best pros to working here. Dead center of downtown Ann Arbor with basically free parking that you can use 24/7 is very attractive to the youngsters. If you are a foodie, this is the place to be. The Ann Arbor location has some decent products to work on and there are actually some interesting and challenging problems to solve. This pro is kind of a con: Barracuda is a decent place for your first or second job - definitely a stepping stone in your career. It's a good place to get in and get some nitty gritty software engineering experience. It's also a good place to learn about typical failures of a workplace. Once you learn these things, you grow from them and move onto something better.

Cons

I'll start with the management here - all the way from the executives in HQ to the directors in Ann Arbor. Not only is it factual, but it is obvious that these people have never had any other jobs nor have they ever been a manager before, nor have they been a manager of managers. The people managers here were promoted to management from individual contributors (IC) because they were probably good at writing code. Writing code does not translate to leading teams. Once they were promoted, they never got any mentorship or formal training. This shows in the poor planning of projects, the really poor professional skills, and really terrible manager-to-IC relationships. Also, I'd love to get an explanation of how someone with a few years of experience goes from an IC to manager to director of engineering within 3 years? It's just not realistic in the 'real world.' "Work/Life Balance" is not a thing here. Work will always take precedence to life at Cuda. You are basically on call 24-7-365. If there's a fire - you're getting called by your manager. If there's a customer issue - you're getting called by your manager. If there's a question your manager has about something he can look up in JIRA - you're getting a call from your manager. If you just had a baby and you took all the PTO you had to get some time with your kid and there's a small bug in your code - you're getting a call from your manager. Also, the benefits are a complete joke here. The worst PTO policy I have ever seen, and this is coming from a Silicon Valley company. Good luck having a significant other or a family. Hopefully, nobody gets sick in your family and you can't come into the office... you will hear about it from your manager. The 401k matching is pretty bad, as well. The tech stack that the products are written on are a disaster. The mentality at cuda is to ship it first and fix it later. That means fixing it later never comes, because you're constantly shipping it. This is not a place to learn best practices. Also as an aside - it says something when the founders of the company that is acquired (Bitleap) leave their product (Backup) behind and go work somewhere else. The stock took a nosedive a year ago and the company was put on the 'tightening the belts' budget. The stock recently also took a decent plunge. This is now two years in a row that the stock suffers pretty badly after the annual financials go out. HR is also a mess here. One person didn't get paid their full salary for an entire year because of something they messed up during hiring. Another person was told they were hired on as a senior when in fact they were hired on as junior. For about a year there was no HR present in the Ann Arbor office at all - letting all the bros run wild with their foosball, head butting, and borderline sexual harassment (if not actual sexual harassment) comments. Also this: there is no diversity at Cuda. This is extremely surprising for a company in Ann Arbor. I would say the office is over 90% white male in the 20-30 age group. I can count the women in the entire office on my two hands, and the women of color on one hand. Last but not least: the lights do not come on in this office. There are a select few people who like to work in the dark, so they are loud enough to make it happen for an office of 200+ people (see first paragraph about management).

3.0
Apr 9, 2017

Technical Supprt

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Paid holidays, paid days off

Cons

Heavy work load 35+ cases a week

Viewing 487 - 489 of 739 Reviews

Glassdoor has 783 Barracuda Networks reviews submitted anonymously by Barracuda Networks employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Barracuda Networks is right for you.