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cPanel is an Unstable Company: Sales have been stagnating, but that's hard to tell, since there is no sales department, no finance team, no accounting - no one in charge of making the business grow. "The product sells itself" - says hardcore cPanelers, cPanel leadership, and other failed companies. Also, very suddenly last year, the CEO decided to sell the company to (and buy an equal shares in) an Oakley Capital investment group - the same group that owns cPanel's main competitor, Plesk. Not much has changed in terms of operations at the company, for now. There have been a few disastrous leadership meetings with the Plesk executive team, all which have lead to the CEO planning to step down, and the planning of demotions for current leadership, mainly due to lack of experience, output, and abilities. Additionally, the platform is built on Perl, a language some developers in the community think of as dead. Perl is extremely difficult to hire developers for and build on. This causes cPanel to make strange and self-harming hiring and retaining choices of developers who are 'too-valuable' to lose from a coding perspective, but hurtful to team function. cPanel is also a clunky, 21+-year-old platform that has just been added onto over the years and re-skinned a few times. They churn out a few features a quarter - sometimes with or without major bugs - but until 2018 they didn't even know how many people were USING the features they built. And they still barely know now. Developing for the sake of developing, or developing for the loudest voice is a common practice at cPanel. Lastly, cPanel is not 'innovative.' The culture is risk-averse to a detriment, anti-conforming, and problem-pointing rather than problem-solving. Traditional hosting is a very mature industry and people have been shifting more quickly to cloud environments, yet cPanel has done nothing as a company to address this shift. cPanel is behind the times and slow to produce output. Additionally, the risk-averse Security Team and SysAdmin Team don't like collaborative, cloud-based solutions, such as Office 365 or GSuite/Google Docs, making it incredibly difficult to get your job done. If you have a data-analysis job, have fun using Apple Numbers to analyze your data set. cPanel is an Unprofessional and Toxic Work Environment: Unprofessional behavior runs rampant throughout cPanel, removing all aspects of consideration and respect towards fellow coworkers, ruining the company culture and allowing others to imitate bad behavior with no consequences. Someone in a mid-level position literally threw food at an admin during lunch because they were angry that admins didn't order chicken parm that day. The individual kept their job for years after that, AND got a promotion. Harassment happens on a weekly, if not daily basis, and usually people get fed up and leave. Developers are able to act however they'd like, which leads to their managers, product owners, and scrum masters to baby them and create an environment where they get still get their way, and somehow some work gets done. A lot of "bad apples" have actually left the company, and then shortly CAME BACK after only a few months because other companies do not tolerate such behavior. Rather than removing the bad apples from teams or the company, they move people around from team to team, resulting in either 1. a lot of bad apples ruining teams throughout the company or, 2. entire teams with very little output that are built entirely of intolerable people who no one else wants to work with. The CEO says "we can always find a spot for them somewhere." One developer was literally fired for STEALING CODE from other websites. He was then rehired later and is now working on (read as: holding up work and refusing to collaborate with) 3 development teams. Not sure how this helps the company culture, or what kind of message it sends to other employees, other than: if you steal, it's okay! The 'Leaders' at cPanel have no experience leading and cannot enable their employees: An executive was fired from their position in May 2017. Employees in that department were told the position would be refilled in 3-6 months. It wasn’t until 2018 when they POSTED the job description. After a year without a director, half of department had left. They hired a new manager (non-executive) in September 2018. It is now February 2019 and the department has officially had 100% turnover in 1.5 years. During this time, the department BEGGED for direction, but the director who took over in the interim had NO experience leading that department and has such poor leadership skills. Under this director, for this department, 0 merit-based raises were given out, 0 bonuses were given out, 0 bonus-structures were implemented, 0 promotions were given, and 0 feedback was listened to or implemented. Meanwhile, in all other departments - ALL of those things took place. In every single other department during that 1.5 years, raises were given, bonuses were given, new bonus structures were implemented, and changes were made to the department due to direct feedback. Leadership plays favorites, so if you are considering a job at cPanel, make sure you get on the right team. Additionally, there is an extreme lack of alignment between different departments and goals. The marketing team had worked on a website redesign for a year and successfully launched their portion. However, the team responsible for updating the store design had failed to put it on their backlog and work it into their trinary (4-month) goals, so they didn’t even start working on back-end development until the new year. This came as a surprise to the marketing team, since the CEO was breathing down their necks for a year, but not the development team? Strange. There are no overarching company goals, except to “increase sales” - which is a weird goal to have considering there is no sales department. cPanel Lacks Any Transparency. Decisions are made behind closed doors often. For instance, for the manager they hired to replace the fired executive, they only let the team interview a single candidate for 25 minutes before hiring that person - 25 minutes to determine team/company culture fit, subject matter expertise and skill (since only people in the department had this specific expertise and skill), and managerial skills/style. Since being hired, the manager hasn’t been a good fit. The last 3 people have all left under this manager due to their lack of skill (surprise), inability to lead, secrecy with which important team decisions are made and timeframe in which those decisions are communicated. cPanel leadership is not transparent when it comes to revenue/profits, so you don’t really know how the company is performing month over month, year over year, etc. It’s very difficult to get information on cPanel's customers, licenses, etc. which is extremely debilitating for job functions that require this information to be successful. cPanel's databases are a mess, and oftentimes inaccurate. Gaining access to pulled data or to be able to pull data yourself is all but impossible, so the entire company is essentially operating in the dark. Since the acquisition, they had to (were forced to) hire a CFO and other financial roles because it is so unclear how above (or below) water the company is. Decisions come from top-down, usually with little explanation, or enablement. cPanel is like the Wild Wild West in terms of processes. Sometimes there is free rein, which causes confusion and often poor work, especially in the external communication realm. Sometimes there are arbitrary or bureaucratic processes that are inefficient or unnecessary. All of this makes it difficult to get good work done on a consistent basis, because some people break important rules that are either there or not, or, too many unnecessary rules are in the way of accomplishing simple tasks. Pay transparency and job function transparency are non-existent. No one knows even close to how much the executives make. Job descriptions are sometimes in limbo and personal goals to align my performance with are not given. Sometimes, managers attempt to change job descriptions mid-year, which would ultimately change goals. Somehow, though, while everything is changing, it is not clear as to how your value is being measured at any time.
