Pros
The people, the latitude, the promotion potential. I work with the best people I’ve ever worked with here. I’ve worked big 5 DoD, Fortune 500, etc but the best people I’ve ever worked with work here. I am above average, but nowhere near the best person here. I love that. I love how much I learn from people here, and that there are so many people here worth respecting. We have people here who can show up in an old thrift store cat sweater with a mild hangover and destroy the best compliance guy in your shop. We have the guy who got the Yar’s Revenge high score on television, and he can steal your data in seconds with a key chain he built from a PCB and a microcontroller. I sit by a guy who says he reads my email, and he isn’t even being ironic. We stole the best guy from the JAB. The best people who used to work at the big 4 all work here. People here actually care about me. My CEO has emailed me directly before and said good job. I know my VP, and EVP. If you work here, you are not treated as a small cog in a large machine. People here are funny, and quirky, and sometimes hung over. People have a drink at happy hour and behave like themselves and I truly love that. People here have personalities. Even the executives are all incredibly normal, approachable, and down to earth. The CISO smiles and says good morning to me every time I’m in the office. All my bosses have been good people. 90% of the people here are awesome, and want to do a good job. I get treated like an adult here. My leaders let me take risks. I’ve been promoted into a job because I said I could do it and my boss believed in me and said, “Ok. Go ahead and try. I’ll help you.” We still do things on a handshake here. Your word actually matters and people often take you at your word when you say you will get something done. We truly believe in work hard, play hard, but we don’t use it as a way to abuse you and make you work nights and weekends. Our work/life balance is pretty good. People use that phrase unironically here. Nobody has once complained when I took time off. I love that we give a wristwatch to employees when they hit their five year mark. It’s classy in that way that jobs used to invest in you back in the day. We all know that the new normal is to change jobs every two years, but nobody really wants to do that. We all want to spend 25 years somewhere with people we know and like, like our parents did. I think the watch represents that ideal. This is the best job I’ve ever had, and I’ve had several at this point in my career.
Cons
The process, and to an extent the benefits. We are still trying to pivot from being a small company to being a big one. A lot of our processes are very poorly developed. Like...we don’t have a real intranet or a wiki. I had that at a shop so small I had to help write it in C#. We switch software so much that some of my people are on Fuze, some on Slack, and some are on Skype. God knows why we change software so much. We are a grown up company now. We need to do big company things like Skype for business, and Slack. Fuze is Busch League. Who cares if it saves a few bucks. Stop switching things. Pick stuff and stick with it. We’ve had two pay systems, share point, Box, a teleconference bridge, Go2meeting, CoalfireOne, and god knows what else in the last year alone. Just. Stop. It confuses us and makes us look dumb to customers because it’s like I’m always on my first week at work learning this stuff. I need to invest my time in supporting clients and not learning ancillary pieces of software. Half the time I can’t find people on Fuze, slack, or Skype and I have to call their phone anyway, which defeats the purpose of having them and paradoxically takes more time, which is the very thing automation is designed to eliminate anyway. Pick 1 tool of each type, force everyone on to it, train them, and stick with it. The benefits are average. If I could tweak something, I’d give better benefits. Other firms with our level of talent pay you a technology stipend every month, they pay for your gym membership, and after you vest they do 10% 401k matching. Now I get that those firms have 100 people and we have 600, but we want to keep our talent because cyber has negative unemployment. I also don’t know our top line and bottom line, so maybe the reality of our business means that better benefits are crazy talk. I don’t know. We are so much better than the companies I’ve worked at in the past though, and we are better than the vanilla Fidelity net benefits account that I’ve had at my last 3 jobs and the same standard healthcare that I’ve also had at my last 3 jobs. The fact that these are the worst things that I have to complain about clearly indicates that things are going well here.