Honestly, all Hashi products are generally really good. I do think they do suffer from moving too fast syndrome. They pushed to go public and most or all of their recent shortcomings can be traced back to trying to push stock prices.
Early Hashicorp was incredible. They were open source stewards and looked like an up-and-coming Redhat or Canonical. Their products were ground-breaking and truly huge value adds to the open-source eco system. But they got extremely popular (mostly thanks to Terraform, which took off and drew more attention to their other products).
But since going public it has been clear that they are trying to get money and enterprise customers at any cost.
Terraform itself has felt like it was in maintenance-mode since hitting version 1. Terraform providers frequently break. For production I have found you need to pin providers down to the patch level, because i've had multiple problems just in small patch-level updates over the recent years. They famously started rejecting any open-source contributions that didn't provide a business value for Hashicorp. Since TF hitting v1, almost all the attention seems to be towards Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise. At Hashicon, it feels like every talk is just propaganda pushing these products. It is all they care about anymore.
Nomad was a product that Hashicorp was very excited about for a while and then they seemed to just abandon on the side of the road in their quest for enterprise dominance (probably after learning that most Enterprises are all-in on K8s and Nomad is more beneficial to fast-moving start-ups).
Vault was an incredible tool, especially in the Open-Source space. But in the past few years they have really split the open-source and licensed versions of Vault significantly which made the open-source version feel more like a burden to Hashicorp. The last time I talked to Hashicorp about Vault (we were deeply considering a switch to Vault at work last year), they treated the open-source self-hosted solution as a "trial" of the real Vault, and that is what it felt like. Almost everything we ran into during setup, they would respond back with "oh that's fine in the enterprise version".
Overall, they have peeled back on all but the absolute minimum efforts required to support their open source versions of products and have been an entirely enterprise focused company for a while. And I can't blame them, sure you need to make money. But I can't help but point to organizations like RedHat and Canonical as examples of what Hashicorp could have been.
At this point I feel like the parent that watches their kids, talking about how they missed out on reaching their potential, thanks mostly to what seems like greed or over-ambition. "I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed" comes to mind when I think of Hashi. I have high-hopes for OpenTofu to fill the Terraform void. I've moved past Vault and am using one of the big hyperscalers' secrets management tools (which I enjoy a lot less, but is cheaper and less complicated). I use kubernetes instead of Nomad, which again is fine, it has become the standard anyway. So i'll be just fine... but I'm dissapointed at you Hashicorp. That's all.
> But since going public it has been clear that they are trying to get money and enterprise customers at any cost.
And yet, as an enterprise customer, their sales team is terrible. Incredibly unhelpful with problems, not willing to discuss pricing, ultimately lost the deal due to how unresponsive they were, and how they basically told as that they wouldn’t be any more likely to fix all the bugs we were hitting if we paid.
The reason they had to go this route is they are getting trounced by their competitors and it’s all their own fault
I wonder if this downhill trend has been in the works for years. In early 2018 I wrote a post[1][2] about my frustrations with interviewing with HashiCorp.
TL;DR: they put me through an interview gauntlet, took my entire day, and ignored me for weeks until I aired my frustrations in their contact us form.
I haven’t used their products since but always heard great things about them. That enterprise push is fierce.
Not at HashiCorp, but I try to respect applicants' time in interviews, and my overall process is less than 3 hours total for interviewing, across 4 people (all of which are self-scheduled). That said, when you have hundreds or thousands of applicants, people inevitably fall through the cracks unless you have an internal recruiting team entirely focused on maintaining that experience.
Interviewing sucks for everyone on either side, and efforts to improve candidate experience on my end have often been met with resistance in the company. One thing I've done is try to be as clear as possible at the end of interviews where someone stands. If it doesn't go well, I try to relate what didn't go well and how it applies to the position we're hiring for. If it goes well, my interviewers and I try to send out invites for the candidate to schedule the next interview within 10 minutes of completion, and I tell them that during the call.
So many companies are so risk-averse though, that they act like interviews are a poker game. I've generally had nothing but positives with my approach, and yes, someone may sue us at some point for being blunt and upfront, but my experience so far is people appreciate honest feedback if you deliver it kindly on the spot.
> One thing I've done is try to be as clear as possible at the end of interviews where someone stands. If it doesn't go well, I try to relate what didn't go well and how it applies to the position we're hiring for.
I tried doing that last time I hired and I think generally speaking makes a good experience for candidates, BUT when you have those 2-3 individuals that have really high opinions of themselves it can get tiring for the hiring manager (myself), because they won't accept the answer anyway and will keep asking and ultimately give some bad review in Glassdoor etc
I don't have too much issue because when it's bad, it's usually because they've failed pretty hard on tech screens for questions that have absolute answers. I have on one occasion had to pull up my IDE and run code and prove my questions to an argumentative candidate, but generally people appreciate the explanations when they are wrong and tell me they've learned something.
The enterprise versions of their products are ridiculously expensive. They're always trying their best to charge you with mistakes (e.g. number of connecting clients). The pricing on the landing page is just a fraction of the real price. That's a big turn-off for me. It's true that I don't want to have the hassle of setting up a production-ready Vault, but seriously, if Hashicorp keeps charging like that I'd would really consider a different solution.
I appreciate Hashicorp, but early on I had a bad taste in my mouth. I paid for their first commercial offering, the VWWare adapter of Vagrant. I had a conversation with Mitchell (can't remember the exact context) around an issue I was encountering, and remember him being pretty dismissive toward what I was asking. Again, I'm sure there's a lot of context I'm not remembering, but I had the feeling that they used their early revenue as their launching pad and were more focused on the next big thing than giving treating their customers as the asset that they were.
Early Hashicorp was incredible. They were open source stewards and looked like an up-and-coming Redhat or Canonical. Their products were ground-breaking and truly huge value adds to the open-source eco system. But they got extremely popular (mostly thanks to Terraform, which took off and drew more attention to their other products).
But since going public it has been clear that they are trying to get money and enterprise customers at any cost.
Terraform itself has felt like it was in maintenance-mode since hitting version 1. Terraform providers frequently break. For production I have found you need to pin providers down to the patch level, because i've had multiple problems just in small patch-level updates over the recent years. They famously started rejecting any open-source contributions that didn't provide a business value for Hashicorp. Since TF hitting v1, almost all the attention seems to be towards Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise. At Hashicon, it feels like every talk is just propaganda pushing these products. It is all they care about anymore.
Nomad was a product that Hashicorp was very excited about for a while and then they seemed to just abandon on the side of the road in their quest for enterprise dominance (probably after learning that most Enterprises are all-in on K8s and Nomad is more beneficial to fast-moving start-ups).
Vault was an incredible tool, especially in the Open-Source space. But in the past few years they have really split the open-source and licensed versions of Vault significantly which made the open-source version feel more like a burden to Hashicorp. The last time I talked to Hashicorp about Vault (we were deeply considering a switch to Vault at work last year), they treated the open-source self-hosted solution as a "trial" of the real Vault, and that is what it felt like. Almost everything we ran into during setup, they would respond back with "oh that's fine in the enterprise version".
Overall, they have peeled back on all but the absolute minimum efforts required to support their open source versions of products and have been an entirely enterprise focused company for a while. And I can't blame them, sure you need to make money. But I can't help but point to organizations like RedHat and Canonical as examples of what Hashicorp could have been.
At this point I feel like the parent that watches their kids, talking about how they missed out on reaching their potential, thanks mostly to what seems like greed or over-ambition. "I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed" comes to mind when I think of Hashi. I have high-hopes for OpenTofu to fill the Terraform void. I've moved past Vault and am using one of the big hyperscalers' secrets management tools (which I enjoy a lot less, but is cheaper and less complicated). I use kubernetes instead of Nomad, which again is fine, it has become the standard anyway. So i'll be just fine... but I'm dissapointed at you Hashicorp. That's all.