Here’s the truth ... - Software Engineer Camunda Employee Review

Camunda is broken — and we’re accelerating in the wrong direction. Speedboat? Try Oil Tanker. SLT loves to call Camunda a nimble speedboat. That’s ironic. Truth is, we’re an oil tanker — slow to steer and cruising straight toward better-funded competitors with billions in the bank who are about to start running circles around us in our home turf of process orchestration. No CRO, no GTM strategy, just chaos. Every GTM team — Sales, Marketing, CS, Partnerships — reports directly to the CEO. There’s no CRO, no clear strategy, and definitely no alignment. The result? A free-for-all of crossed wires, conflicting priorities, and teams blaming each other for missed targets. Everyone’s rowing in a different direction, and nobody’s steering. The DRI model is a scapegoat factory. In theory, “Directly Responsible Individuals” should drive accountability. In reality? It gives everyone else permission to disengage, then point fingers when things go south. Bonus dysfunction: sometimes the DRI no longer works here, so the blame shifts to whoever forgot to assign a new one. It’s not actual ownership. Outcomes don’t matter — optics do. Want to try something new or fix a broken process? You’ll spend more time arguing whether it’s a task, objective, or initiative than actually improving anything. Good ideas get buried under bureaucracy and ego. G&A is where good ideas go to die. Legal, IT, and HR don’t just create red tape — they are the red tape. Legal routinely kills deal velocity. They move at a glacial pace, with zero commercial urgency. Prospects have told us our contracts are more complicated than Microsoft’s - the largest company in the world. Let that sink in. HR is inconsistent and defensive. Instead of investing in people, the default response is “if you don’t like it, leave.” Promotions feel random. Firings feel political. Support feels nonexistent. IT think we are developing the next 6th generation fighter. Every day I think I enter my password five times on the same computer. Also, we’re in 2025 and somehow still using Outlook for email because IT think it's more secure ... but we still use Google for everything else. You can't make this up.