Smart people, career-defining challenges - Engineering Manager Braze Employee Review

Great culture, smart people, interesting work

No major cons to speak of

Braze has a good product. Comp is average to slightly below average for the industry. A lot of smart people pass through the doors of Braze. Most of them don't last long.

Product: Between legacy tech companies moving into customer engagement and smaller startups with similar / cheaper products, Braze's future looks pretty bleak. Equity: Braze's stock price has been in free fall for more than a year and is still overvalued at $20. Your equity might be worthless by the time you vest. Career growth: Internal promotions are few and far between and are never based on quality of work or merit. More often than not, people with no understanding of the product or industry are hired to manage long-tenured experts who didn't need managing in the first place. Culture: High achieving, competent people at Braze are seen as a threat to leadership. They eventually get fed up and leave because they can't get promoted or are forced to answer to managers that were hired over them for jobs they deserved. When they leave, they take their expertise to competitors or other industries and 3 or 4 people are usually needed to do the work they leave behind. Leadership: Braze churns through VPs + middle management at an alarming clip. Great leaders quit because they're not prepared for the micromanagement they endure and can't actually get anything done. The ones that seem to stick were only hired because they worked at Zendesk w/ the CBO or at Salesforce with someone in the Sales org. Not because they have relevant management experience, understand strategy, or the product.