senior software engineer

software engineer

account executive

consultant

technical consultant

Appian

Not sales friendly - led by technologists/engineers.  Many in sales management have little to no experience selling or managing sales teams.  Sales management tends to micromanage and can be verbally aggressive with sales people.  Sales management negotiates pricing and contracts - sales people are not allowed to discuss pricing and contracts with customers & prospects.  Because management takes over pricing and contract negotiation, sales people have little to no influence over deal timing/closure.  Therefore, quota achievement and commission payout is completely dependent on management’s ability to close deal in given time frame. Less than 5% of sales team achieve quota year over year.  

Seasoned & proven salespeople are not respected.  Sales people are not celebrated when leading sales campaigns.  Sales management prefers to be positioned as sales leader in front of customers and prefer sales people to execute tasks assigned by management.  Many sales managers are new to sales and have limited sales training or experience.

It’s a politically charged environment, where political alignment is favored over ability.   Global sales strategies vary greatly from region to region and country to country.  Consistency is missing across sales organization; rather sales organization operates like fiefdoms.
  
Sales Operations defines and measures sales process and activities.  With limited actual sales experience and understanding, Sales Operations tends to measure sales performance on inconsequential activities.   But performance rankings of inconsequential activities are the focus for Appian management.

All sales activities begin with the telesales team.  Field sales people are at the mercy of the inexperienced telesales team who are measured based on the number of calls and meetings set for sales people.  Unfortunately, meetings are generally set with non-influential, low level prospects. Sales people must execute calls and force meetings with those contacts to achieve sales high performance rankings.   Much time is lost as sales people perform these mandatory, non-value add activities.

As a member of the inside sales team, I am an the phones with prospects and customers discussing Appian's technology Platform and various issues present in their environments. In this role I've attended product training and gained knowledge of systems and applications and current and emerging trends in IT, including Social, Mobile, Cloud. The Founders of Appian and other Senior Management Staff are committed to the growth and success of the company and have a long term vision to grow the enterprise. Co-workers are bright and driven, and Appian recruits heavily from top schools, including Duke, UVA, MIT, Virginia Tech and Dartmouth.
No hardest part of the job comes to mind, but Appian is a fast moving company, with frequent upgrades/new features, so Appianites are not standing in place. Applicants with an interest in taking on challenges and making a difference and those are committed to excellence should take a serious look at this company. As an innovative leader in technology that has relevance to any person or company looking to improve the way work is handled, I enjoy being part of a company making an impact across industry verticals, both in the commercial market and in Federal Agencies. Since a number of Appian's hires are either newly minted college graduates or young experienced hires, Appian has a young culture and it is great being around these employees because of their enthusiasm and passion for the product and the technology. Appian's technology has been validated by independent Analyst Firms, including Gartner.

I have worked for Appian for over 8 years now and found it to be an exciting place to work providing me with long term career growth.

Since working for Appian, I have held technical positions, sales leadership positions, and product leadership positions spanning multiple departments. I have had the opportunity to work with a wide variety of clients across North America, Europe and Australia.

I have learned that one must always be innovating to stay ahead in the software industry. Appian is not a place for a 9-to-5 job, but rather a place that is always working hard to push the boundaries of innovation in software and technology.

Management has been strong, founding the company of solid business practices and financial growth. We never grow beyond our means or put ourselves in a position of financial distress. This has made for reliably stable growth and new opportunities for all the employees.

My co-workers are all excellent. Appian has been very selective in hiring employees and has hired only those who are dedicated to the enterprise software space, intelligent and work well with the rest of the team. Sometimes this has meant we have many open positions waiting to find the right person, though.

The hardest part of the job is keeping up with the pace of innovation. To work at Appian, you must be always thinking a few steps ahead and not settling for 2nd best.

The most enjoyable part of Appian is the constant pace of innovation and learning along with the confidence that the company is financially sound and grows organically.

Appian is an innovative software company with vision, disciplined management, solid benefits, and fantastic employees. Having worked for a start-up, small and medium-sized companies, to Fortune 100 global companies, I can confidently say that Appian strikes the right balance and is the best place I've worked at.

The company is a leader in the enterprise software industry for business process management but it's never complacent. Appian's management team and its employees keep innovating its award-winning product, delivering world-class services to global companies, and finding ways to improve how to run and grow the company.

Appian believes in hiring the best people, so salary and benefits are competitive. Additional perks, activities, and company-sponsored events are awesome: free food, sports games, concerts, weekend retreats, just to name a few.

Employees are definitely high caliber professionals who are intelligent, collaborative, driven, and fun! Being a growing company, there are opportunities for growth and advancement. Management empowers employees to do their work in a supportive environment. They also encourage us to bring new ideas to the team and even to the CEO.

Appian is a great place for people who are talented, motivated, disciplined, and team-oriented. If you're just looking to get a job, get by, and get a paycheck, Appian is probably not the place for you.

I've worked at several east coast software start-ups, and was starting to believe that they all either moved to California or went under - until I came to Appian. Appian has got the best team of software engineers I've ever worked with. Since starting at Appian, I've gotten hands-on experience with software development concepts I'd read about but never dreamed of actually doing unless I went to work for Google or Microsoft - like working on a declarative expression language and the framework that runs it.

Furthermore, the company is rock solid. Strong revenue, profitable, and negligible VC, so no one's gonna force them to relocate or do anything they don't want to do.

I joined Appian as a senior engineer, and found myself right in the middle between engineers who had been at Appian for 5+ years and knew a lot more than me, and a vibrant group of engineers joining Appian right out of school. It's an incredibly challenging job, but it's a fun culture whether you're young and single or have a few more years under your belt, kids and a mortgage.

My favorite thing about my job is that Appian doesn't back down from anything because it's technically challenging. They know what they want their product to do, and don't cut corners.

Much as they like to say otherwise, Appian is another typical corporation that views you as a number. Don't be fooled by the company propaganda. A lot of university hires, myself included, are drawn in by the promises only to feel let down. It's why Appian has a pattern of losing university hires 2-3 years in.

General lack of empathy - it reflects in the way they treat employees during difficult times (i.e. layoffs) and during moments of dissent (i.e. RTO, still highly controversial today).

3 days in office, but probably will be full-time eventually, since CEO wants an in-office culture.

WLB is good, but if you don't meet the fast pace in engineering, you might be expected to work outside your hours to be seen as a "star" (have had managers tell me this, or managers brag about how they tell other employees to spend their free time working extra to gain brownie points). There is one manager in particular that has told me to make major life decisions solely for the purpose of furthering my career at Appian, only for me to get laid off soon after. Look after yourself, and don't end up in a position where you're exploited and taken advantage of by a company that frequently says they will protect you.

Most enjoyable part of the job was leaving.

If you aren't one of the old timers at Appian you will always be treated as someone that just cannot know enough about the product to be taken seriously. There is a serious trust deficit by management driven by incompetence at the mid to senior leadership tier (RVP/AVP) that holds them accountable to unreasonable objectives that are often misaligned with the realities of the business. RVPs tend to be hyper-micromanagers and will want to attend every single phone call. Leaders across the company will only trust RVPs and above and you need to reinforce the micromanagement structure to be successful.

Appian has grown a lot over the years but growth beyond being a $500m annual revenue company will be impossible without a significant change in overall leadership and strategy. They do actually have a great product but leadership from the CEO on down gets in the way of success. This is actually a company that is successful despite itself and could be wildly successful with fresh ideas.

Appian is hungry for new and young talent to drive their "innovative" culture while executive leadership pushes, with an iron hammer, work/sales culture from the 1990s. I think Appian is a good place to get your foot in the door to tech/SaaS/PaaS/enterprise but nothing more. Within 6 months you will realize the timelines they gave you are just pipe dreams or false promises. The product/company mantra changes on a monthly basis. I went through 5 AEs and 3 managers in less than a year. Turnover is insanely high. Top performers are laid off with no concrete reason, and CEO sends out emails about "restructuring, optimization, no more layoffs" and then promptly 200+ people get laid off within the next 3 months.

Appian management is hit and miss. Fiefdoms are everywhere and they are hostile to each other. Managers protect head-count and aggressively reject responsibility for the code-base, leading to a situation where you have very bloated parts of the engineering department while at the same time, technical debt continues to pile up and pile up.

There's a lot of politics in Appian and very little accountability for senior people and managers, especially people well connected to senior leadership. "Protected" people are permitted to ignore good development practices and force work onto other teams, disrupting plans and timelines. 

I've been with Appian for a little over 5 years and am still a nerdily happily employee. It's the ideal environment for people that want to build something, work with smart/fun people, and have a voice. We're constantly innovating and finding better ways to achieve superior results across all departments. Some department heads are more challenging than others, but everyone is reasonable and will listen to ideas when presented respectfully with data backing your suggestions. Due to our size, your work gets noticed, and it's difficult for anyone to fly under the radar. Great for employees that are driven and want to make an impact. Not-so-great for underperformers. The founders have managed to maintain the fun, inclusive, quirky culture post- IPO, and I hope that never changes.

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