Avoid Ridgeline If You Want To Work For A Real Tech Company
Pros
Pros? Nice location...? They are located in Tyson’s Corner, VA.
Cons
Where to even begin? Going to Ridgeline International was one of my worse mistakes as an adult. I have spent years working in the US military, the intelligence community, and the private sector, but nothing prepared me for the amateur hour I faced at Ridgeline. The onboarding process was smooth and very easy. I was even courted by a couple of C-suite officers. In hindsight, I now realize that I was oversold on not only what the job would be but also oversold on the opportunities that would be there once I came onboard. The CTO made promises that he never delivered on. Ridgeline is run by the CTO, which means that there are no real checks and balances. It’s a cult of personality. If the CTO was well-educated and a dynamic leader, this may not be a bad thing. Unfortunately, he is not. Like most of the senior managers at Ridgeline, the CTO is a former enlisted military guy who may or may not have gone to college. So, if you are looking for well-educated, creative, and innovative managers, people who have real leadership experience (as opposed to overseeing a platoon of grunts doing signals intelligence), you won’t find it at Ridgeline. While Ridgeline is supposed to cater to both clients in the intelligence community and Department of Defense, they really don’t. They hire almost entirely prior enlisted guys and have hired extremely few people from the civilian side of the house with real intelligence experience. If you want to see the direction of Ridgeline, you have no further to look than their recent hires. It’s not going anywhere good. Because you have a bunch of recently enlisted military guys running the show, there exists an extraordinarily parochial perspective on things. The Ridgeline management believes they are they first to have ever encountered a problem (for example, it was a novel idea for them to teach people online), and they believe that only they can come up with a technical solution (never mind most have never been to college and TONs of companies already are doing what they are attempting to do). This leads to a lot of shoddy work, half-baked plans, and poor execution. They chase after ideas that others have discounted as being untenable or simply science fiction, as they have no frame of reference or true depth of understanding. The company is hiring an enormous number of people, just not the best. I believe that the CTO and other founders are trying to build the company up as quickly as possible so that they can sell it. I don’t think this will happen, though, as they have started to garner a poor reputation in the intelligence community. Like with some of their hires, they have oversold and underdelivered. My prediction is that Ridgeline will be out of business within five years. You can’t outrun your reputation.
