Pros
There are many things Coalfire does well and some it struggles with. The culture is best characterized as 1) hard working, 2) lots of learning, 3) rapid career advancement, 4) competitive compensation & benefits, and 5) great people to work with. The company and its management are highly ethical, but it isn’t perfect and it struggles with training and communication challenges. The company never had a formal training program and this has led to some real dissatisfaction. Hiring aspiring talent and not training them properly is not a recipe for success, especially in a growing company. There were other growing pains and there still are. The good news is management seems conscious of the shortfalls and appears to be working to improve them. All-in-all, a good company to work at, not a perfect company, but seemingly trying hard to improve and keep employees happy, engaged and advancing in their careers. It’s hard to ask much more from an employer than that. I plan to stay here for another few years and continue developing my skills and career growth in this exciting and rapidly growing company and industry.
Cons
The biggest challenge has been the company’s traditional reliance on informal, on-the-job training. There are lots of smart people here and the assumption has been we learn from one another. As is evident in these reviews, it wasn’t working great. Formal training was only recently established to augment OJT, ranging from developing an increasingly robust on-line video learning library with associated learning curriculum (still clearly a work in progress) to formal externally-led live sessions. More is needed, but it’s nice to see a start to addressing the need. Company communications have also been an issue. Relying on the company newsletter to share company happenings has not been sufficient. The CEO hosts a quarterly all-employee company status presentation. The subjects used to be high-level and inspirational, which were great the first time you heard them but got old quickly. He seems to be listening to feedback. The info shared has become very detailed and direct, surprisingly so for a company this size. On the last one he shared recognition of things that have not been working well (many captured in reviews here) and his plans to fix them. That was nice to see since it shows management cares about creating a strong environment for us to work in.