Vantaggi
- Ariba is market leader in procurement space. It is a different feeling to be working on a product that is the leader in the market. You have fortune 100 companies as clients. - You get to work on core functionality at Bangalore like Sourcing, Contracts, Invoicing, Ordering, Ariba networks etc unlike some other MNCs which push off not-so-important functionality offshore. - Ariba has excellent sales force and consultants throughout the world and of course the product development team at the US is fairly good. You get to communicate and work with these people. - Pay is good and they wont throw you out if you are meeting expectations. The management realizes that the longer you stay, the better your ability to contribute more on working on these home grown frameworks. Make no mistake, if you are not meeting expectations, you will be asked to go. - You will get good product development experience - the product is deployed on home grown cloud, supports multi-locale, customizable by clients - You get a 3 month honey moon period when you join - Ariba's bangalore office's Ambience sucks a bit but you will find quite some good freedom for yourself. Some of the glassdoor reviews paint too much of a negative picture. Much of the negativity comes from complexity of the work: A majority of developers in Bangalore cannot excel at their job and satisfy the reviewers.
Svantaggi
- Honestly, I think a majority of the developers in Bangalore are just about average. The platform team understands may be just about 10% of the platform code. They show no interest in either understanding it or explaining the platform to apps team. In fact, when bugs are assigned, there would be a tendency of passing the buck to different teams. You will see a lack of ownership in the real sense in some of the teams here - I cant speak for everyone. - The platform team is almost entirely new and of a very small size. I wonder if it makes sense for a small unit like Ariba with less than perhaps 25 members in platform development team to have their own platform - your UI, web framework, ORM, webservice, build process etc everything is homegrown. The platform developers are also not so good. It perhaps makes sense for a large army of developers like that of SAP or Microsoft to have their own platform. But Ariba? The result is the platform is not evolving very well. Only the old timers can understand the platform very well but would not let out these trade secrets to other developers much. Heck, can you work on hibernate without a good online communit?. If you want to know some best practices, you will find by googling; if you get an error or you want to understand how it works, you'll google. You are not likely to open hibernate code to find these yourself. But when you join Ariba, you will have very moderate documents, almost no java doc and you have to figure all these yourself by looking at code. Beware, if you are not very smart or if you are the impatient type, Ariba can be hell for you. - Ariba's apps also require quite some redesigning, refactoring and re-engineering. But the guys in Bangalore and even most in the US too are not capable of re-engineering - including the principal engineers. Ariba's management would give you all freedom to contribute to your potential in general but there are not many takers in the engineering team. The management team perhaps understand this and gives the load that the team in Bangalore can take but you see comments in Glassdoor that Ariba does not give good work to Bangalore. The truth is the Engineers are not good enough to work on something as complex as home grown frameworks, multi-lingual apps that are customizable. You will have to have the ability to think in terms of frameworks, subsystems etc to be able to make a big difference in Ariba. But many just know the java language well and cannot engineer or think about frameworks or subsystems nor are they experts in designing. If this is the case, why cant one be humble and know one's limitation? Why blame someone else? If you have the ability, go ahead and re-engineer Ariba's frameworks and apps. Ariba's HR and management would be delighted to hire you if you have that kind of capabilities. - You get an opportunity to understand that the passionate discourses about customer service are not very true. In that sense, it can be hurtful to see the very top management guys are not really angels to their customers : they just want their money - this is a problem only if you are a bit altruistic. And you have to live your life in Ariba bearing in mind Warren buffet's advice that Honesty is an extremely rare gift and do not expect it from cheap people. You got to realize that you are working for a business organization and not for Red Cross. So, your colleagues and other stakeholders will not be very charitable. - When engineers from Bangalore go to the US for three weeks of KT, they invariable get just half a day of KT from the US team. Reason: The US team is busy. I have never seen this highlighted as a problem and wonder why. - Ariba does have its share of bad people in management. Some managers cannot define what a project is and have very little knowledge on processes. Ariba just makes sure their managers can talk coherently and articulate a bit but in a market leading product company, you expect them to be much better. - HR is not smart to understand that employees are scared to give feedback. It is a small company and invariably, the person who gives bad feedback about their reporting managers have been found with good accuracy and screwed. To the HR: Do not expect real feedback from employees. Your surveys cannot guarantee anonymity or non-traceability. - I have seen people working for 18 hours a day for few months before a release. You could argue that the reason is incompetence but even that means Ariba has recruited an incompetent person for the job. The management has to think about this. And BTW, at the Bangalore office, people work for both bugs and new releases. It is not just bug fixing. Like I said, I really believe that you can do well at Ariba only if you are super smart - not just a person who knows GoF design patterns and Java language well. That is a minimum qualification not at all enough to excel at Ariba. - You need to have the ability to connect to people well. Only then you can learn Ariba's products well. It is very difficult to learn everything on your own unless you are truly extra-ordinary. - Ariba's architects/engineers cannot solve tough problems like why is Ariba still working with 32 bit JVM? Can Ariba's architects defend this to an architect at Google? If you are a developer with modest abilities at Ariba, then you will live with many fundamental problems that neither can you solve nor the platform team can solve. - Many at Ariba cannot get out of the company and especially the old timers seem to cling to their jobs and could give the new comer a hard time. And yes, some are so lowly that they expect you to bootlick. It is especially painful because you can see that these old timers too have only modest abilities but nevertheless they show their power. To me it is like, even wolves can show power within their community but in the presence of lions, they will know their place. The old timers need to realize this but they don't. Make no mistake, some of the old timers in some teams are a delight to work with. One wishes that all the bad ones will be culled out one day but that will not happen if Ariba works with their own frameworks and not open source or other commercial ones. - You get 5 star glass door reviews by some Ariba insiders with hopelessly wrong comments or you get one star review by many who cannot introspect well enough.