cloud engineer

software engineer

customer success manager

systems administrator

linux engineer

Rackspace Technology

Rackspace used to be a sought after place to work with tales of flexibility, career development, work-life balance, energizing culture, a company that treats its employees like family, and so much more. This was all true when I joined the company 5 years ago and now, that is ALL gone. 

The company's number one priority is making money and there is no culture to speak of. 

Pay- the party is the lowest in the market and industry and they used to say the benefits made up the difference. That was true for me and a lot of others until all that started changing.

Culture- First they took away funding that was used for team members. There used to be a budget for things like birthdays or promotion celebrations, team building activities, sending flowers to a Racker who may have been ill, lost a family member or recently had a new baby. That no longer exists nor does Rackspace care about any of these life events. 

The company would also regularly host happy hours as a way to network across the very large business. Yes, they would include alcohol and sometimes was even on company grounds. That has since be completely stopped.

Then the castle used to be full of "fueling stations" where items like tea, coffee, soda and fruit were always available to help you through your work day. All around the castle there were maybe 8 stations and that has been reduced to one station with nothing but a kitchenette. 

Now they have announced that there is no circumstance in which you will be allowed to work from home unless approved by the CEO himself. Good-bye flexibility. 

The culture started dramatically changing when lay-offs became a regular thing and the mass hiring of ill-equipped sales people started. Sales people are not properly trained but will do anything to make a sale, especially lie and step on whoever they need to be able to over sell and under deliver. They don’t know their products and consistently set unrealistic expectations for customers. It's a serious problem for all who handle  them after a deal has closed and we have to tell them what they paid for doesn’t actually exist.  And accountability for those sales people??? Forget it.

The company is siloed and everyone is out for themselves. There is no unity, common goal or sense of belonging. There is no accountability. No follow through on development and no managers willing to go to bat for their people. It's all gone. 

For customers a big selling point was 24/7 American based support. That also is no longer the case. The majority of support has been outsourced to India. (We’ve all been there trying to get support from someone not in the US and we all know how frustrating that is.)

For a company who wants to be considered a competitor with big tech, it clearly doesn't understand what might make them a desirable place to work. 

Rackspace doesn’t put customers first. Rackspace doesn’t put their people first. Rackspace puts their walker first.  Do yourself a favor and stay away.

Rackspace is filled with some of the brightest and most talent individuals. It moves fast and change is a constant. Expect it and learn to embrace it. Further your education and training is extremely supported. Use your 1 on 1 time to discuss career paths, goals, and opportunities for yourself. No one is expected to stay in a particular role and if you are passionate about a certain aspect of your current role, there is most likely something within the org to move into. 

The hardest part of the job can be trying to make sure you are armed with the right information. Tribal knowledge, documentation, processes can be in multiple places and different almost per Racker. Learn to ask questions early about where to find information. There is also no official training for a particular role. Its very shadow heavy and sink or swim. Self starters excel well here. The pay is also less than the national average for the same role. Most Rackers understand this and the work environment makes up for it. The most frustrating part was having the mission change. Its hard re-directing a tanker and this took time. By the time we were there, we were targeting something different. 

The most enjoyable part of the job is the connection that you make with your team and the amazing customers. Rackspace customers are by far the most fun and challenging group. They lean heavily on us. Expect this, but also treat the relationships with great care. The CORE values rang true, especially within Support.

•	Experienced Business Analyst with an extensive knowledge of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) methodologies, such as-Waterfall, Agile and Rational Unified Process (RUP).
•	Expertise in Business Modeling using MS Visio/Enterprise Architect/Rational Requisite Pro
•	Expertise in Requirements Gathering through direct user interviews and workshops.
•	Experience in facilitating and conducting JAD sessions, interviews, workshops, and requirement elicitation sessions with end-users, clients, stakeholders and development team. 
•	Exceptional Documentation Skills for writing Business Requirements Document, Functional Requirement Documents, and Use Cases as well as for creating Use Case diagrams, Activity diagrams, based on UML Methodology and Business process flow diagrams.
•	Defining Test Cases, creating Test plans, Test logs, Bug Triage, interacting with QA / dev teams in fixing errors.
•	Excellent Client relationship management, analytical, problem solving, written and oral communication, and presentation skills.
•	Ability to work independently or in a team/cross-functional teams, manage and prioritize multiple projects, quick learner.
•	Experience in assisting the Development team during construction periods and assisting the QA team in test case design and performing UAT and provide presentations to the business team.
•	Adept in creating and maintaining Traceability Matrix.

The Rackspace that hired me isn't in any way, aside from name, the Rackspace that fired me.  (This was even admitted by Human Resources during my exit).  "Fanatical Support" USED to exist, it no longer does; not at Rackspace.  It has been nothing more than a corporate buzzword since early 2015.  The very essence of their "fanatical support", was, by the CEO-at-the-time's own admission, the "Rackers" (employees) themselves.  When the majority of your "special sauce" has either been canned for questionable reasons or left of their own volition, you have to start wondering if Rackspace actually has anything at all left to offer.  Disgusting amounts of money are put into making the environment SEEM to be "fun", when in reality, the elaborate and expensive decorations are almost a thinly-veiled insult to those actually on the front lines, doing the heavy lifting.  Management has become cattle-herding.  Too many undeserving, under-qualified personnel moved up too far, too fast, and are a little too eager to crack the whip in order to move even further up the chain of command.  They're completely aware of the dire situation that Rackspace is in and are taking complete advantage of it for the sake of adding another bullet point to their resumes.  If the company continues in this current direction, I seriously doubt that they'll exist a year from now, and this deeply saddens me, because it used to be a fantastic company that actually lived their own core values.

Culture is no longer what it was at Rackspace.  The company is now owned by a private equity company and being running super lean with yearly RIFs.   
Gone are the Sugarbear MC'ed, culture celebrating days.  No more inspirational and motivational Lanham led peptalks.   There are more meetings and meetings-to-plan-meetings than ever. There are so many programs, projects and initiatives right now with fewer people to work on them that somedays it feels like Rackers are getting punked.
So what's happening that's good?  Rackspace is slowly and painstakingly being transformed.  There's a ton of tech debt that's being ripped out and replaced with enterprise quality tools and systems.  Much needed consolidation across the business units is taking place.  New relationships with huge global partners are being formed.  It's exciting but there's a lot of hard work ahead.  It's a struggle to stay committed to the grind with so many other "fun" and "exciting" opportunities in the world.
And let's be honest.  The current owners are not in it for the long haul.  Culture is being nursed along to keep it the Fanatical homage alive .  Let's all hope that the new owners value and reinvest in the Rackers that keep the Fanatical in Fanatical Support. And let's hope it happens in the not too distant future.

The company itself has a persona and reputation that seems compelling, but that doesn't extend to the night shift. Night shift is consistently understaffed and overworked. Constantly stressed and rules have been quickly changing the entire time I've been there with the majority of communication being through random emails that may or may not actually make it to everyone. Benefits are pretty good, but management seems to have the idea that they can just throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks. The company keeps going through the same cycle of ideas hoping that this time the strategy will work with a couple tweaks. When a good idea actually gets implemented, the people who work on it move on and do not get replaced. 

Co-workers are sometimes knowledgeable, but a general lack of training prevents a majority of people from having a good path to move up through. Learning is expected to be on-the-job, but minimal time or documentation is provided to learn from/during(Recently there have been efforts to fix this, but managers have been co-opting this time for work tasks). Nearly ALL knowledge at this job is tribal, meaning that you find out everything from asking someone else. There is an internal wiki that is getting better, but it is so disorganized that it can be unsearchable at times.

Rackspace is not the same place it was 6-8 years ago.  There is almost no vision, a lot of politics and very limited opportunity.  They have made efforts to automate large scale tasks, but done virtually nothing to improve general productivity and work experience. The core values are but a shadow of what they used to be.

One great thing about Rackspace is the amount of knowledge acquired. So many different devices in so many different environments with so many potential problems provides ample opportunity to learn.

The culture at Rackspace used to be great.  There is some sense of that still, but it's difficult to enjoy culture with ominous overtones of the company's future looming overhead.

Though there are technically challenging things to deal with, the most difficult part of the job is making sure all your ducks are in a row. All processes and procedures are entirely manual and need to be followed on virtually everything touched. This is important to minimize mistakes and reduce risk, but because everything is manual, it introduces more opportunity for mistakes.

What is great is the opportunity to work with so many customers. Some techs are not fond of this, but it is a part of the job.

If you get hired in an entry level role and end up being a top performer on your team there's good chance you'll be rewarded/promoted for it. And you will learn a ton along the way. It might get frustrating though. It's easy for people to push work around from department to department without any work actually getting done. This causes routine requests to go untouched for weeks until a deadline is approaching and everyone is stressed out. Taking care of stuff like this is what will help you stand out.

This was my experience in the last few years at least. There has been a lot of change in that time and there are plenty of folks who carry around an attitude of "Rackspace isn't what it used to be".

The benefits are great, but Rackspace is known for paying below market value for a lot of positions. Still, if you get an offer that you like I think it's worth taking. If you're on the fence it's worth doing some research on customer's past and current opinions of the company.

Lots of learning opportunities on latest Cloud and virtualization technologies. Generous in-person training classes along with support for conference participation and professional development activities. 

Management solicits feedback and takes action to address problems in management, infrastructure, and operations on regular basis. Overall, they provide employees with a lot of information about the business and strategy.

Company direction shifts often with major pivots about every six months. It's rare to see a project from beginning to final completion before the direction changes. 

Good people to work with. In general, people try their best to help customers and solve problems.

Rackspace prides itself on it's 'culture' of friends and family, transparency, excellence in everything they do... yada yada yada. The truth is that they have outgrown their original business model, the bureaucracy has grown to the point that nothing can get done without endless meetings and countless hours wasted arguing over some bit of minutia. Middle management/Team Leaders are completely untrained, inept, unprepared and unable to handle the teams they are given to lead. In some cases they are put into lead positions in which they have no clue what the job duties of their reports are, how to do them, or how to assist them in performing those duties. Management and lead positions seem to be handed out based on attrition rather than merit or competency.Specific departments have specific skill sets necessary to lead, not the least of which is leadership ability. Rackspace has forgotten this and continues to promote personnel to leadership roles who have no leadership skills or training.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Cloud engineer 5 salaries reported	$116,008 per year
Software engineer 38 salaries reported	$88,125 per year
Customer success manager 3 salaries reported	$82,333 per year
Systems administrator 8 salaries reported	$47,375 per year
Linux engineer 3 salaries reported	$101,667 per year

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