Chaotic & stressful; I learned a lot but would not want to be there for the long haul. - werkgeversreview Anonieme werknemer bij DrFirst

2,0
5 dec 2012
Anonieme werknemer
Aanbevelen
Goedkeuring directeur
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Pluspunten

There was a lot of freedom in defining your position, or at least there was within the marketing department, so you have the opportunity to take on as much responsibility as you want, and learn a lot of new things.

Minpunten

Everyone was so busy that most people weren't willing to work together if it meant any additional work. The company is pretty disorganized and many of the employees were stressed out and unhappy, hence the extremely high turnover rate. Also management gave conflicting feedback, sometimes they were perfectly happy with your performance, and sometimes you were in danger of being let go, all within the same week. Along with conflicting feedback was conflicting priorities: any exec from any department could step in at any time and tell you that this new project was the highest priority, whether it was marketing based or the company's new Christmas card. In an effort to be more organized, we spent a good portion of our time in meetings, but the point of the meetings tended to be yelling at people for bad results, rather than brainstorming and organizing new projects, so they weren't terribly helpful.

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Reactie van DrFirst
13y
We appreciate this feedback and have made a concerted effort to add more structure, clearer goals and greater mentorship to our Marketing dept. The leadership of a department is critically important to its success and the direction of the team. We were aware of these issues and recognized the problem and we have made significant changes to the management of the Marketing team. We have grown very large, very quickly, due to our success and needing to ramp up to meet demands – unfortunately sometimes that comes with some growing pains. DrFirst is always looking for ways to refine our efforts and have happy and productive teams, we encourage more dialogue about issues so that we can work together to quickly find solutions.

Ontdek andere reviews over DrFirst

5,0
29 mei 2026
Aanbevelen
Goedkeuring directeur
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Pluspunten

Great experience, team, and opportunity

Minpunten

None as of yet, have not been here long enough

avatar
Reactie van DrFirst
3d
Thank you so much for sharing this! We're thrilled to hear you're having a great experience so far. Our internship program is something we put a lot of heart into, and it means a lot to know it's coming through. We hope the rest of your time with us is just as rewarding. Welcome to the DrFirst family!
2,0
9 jun 2026
Aanbevelen
Goedkeuring directeur
Zakelijk vooruitzicht

Pluspunten

- Remote Work - Cool tech stack - Some great individual contributors

Minpunten

Personally, I definitely had a '1 star' worthy experience at DrFirst due to the toxicity of the leadership I interacted with. However, I was hesitant to actually rate DrFirst as a '1 star' here since my experience was limited to the cyber security team, and I don't think it's fair to suggest that all of the various teams within DrFirst are the same way. In my situation, I first encountered some of this toxicity on my 4th day at the company - where I was pulled into a 1 on 1 with senior security leadership, who proceeded to go on somewhat of a tangent about previous security personnel at DrFirst who they had terminated, and explicitly told me they had a '3 strike policy' and suggested they had no problem letting me go in the event I reached this ambiguous '3 strike' threshold (which was never defined). It's worth mentioning that I'm very aware that if someone doesn't do their job > they will eventually get terminated, that's a pretty widely accepted notion. But hearing these comments just 4 days after starting was pretty shocking. I was hoping this was somewhat of a one-off too, but this kind of language and management style that I perceived as heavily focused on termination risk and negative consequences rather than coaching and development persisted in just about every 1 on 1 over the course of the next month, which led me to realize I should probably get out sooner rather than later. In addition to some of this behavior directed towards me, senior security leadership would also regularly make questionable/not-so-positive comments in passing about broader company leadership (e.g., technology leadership) - in our 1 on 1s. I wasn't sure how to respond to some of these comments, but they were also somewhat of a theme in a lot of our 1 on 1 interactions. Another kind of crazy thing I experienced while at DrFirst was security leadership's use of Claude. I'm very pro-AI in the workplace setting (especially in the security engineering setting), but the way in which security leadership would try and leverage Claude and interpret Claude output was pretty shocking. In one instance, a security concern was escalated (by senior security leadership) based largely on Claude output. After additional investigation by individual contributors on the team, the issue was determined not to be a real security incident and appeared to stem from a misunderstanding of the model's output. That experience raised concerns for me about how AI-generated information was being evaluated before operational decisions were made and was just generally pretty wild to witness first-hand because of how trivial the hallucination was to decipher once individual contributors on the team actually saw what was going on. So, take the 'AI-first' attitude that is advertised with a grain of salt, as some of what is actually going on behind the scenes is kind of wonky. I want to emphasize one more time that I don't think my experience at DrFirst represents the company at large, and that I think there are tons of great individual contributors at DrFirst. My immediate counterparts on the security team were genuinely awesome to work with (veryyy smart and kind people), and my encounters with HR, IT, and other teams at the company were also really positive. Unfortunately, the immediate security leadership (composed of 1 VP at the time of posting) made my time here pretty unbearable, which resulted in me accepting an offer at another firm just 6 weeks after my first day.

1
avatar
Reactie van DrFirst
3d
Thank you for taking the time to share this feedback. We're genuinely glad to hear about your positive experience with HR, IT, and your immediate teammates. This reflects the culture we work hard to build across DrFirst. We take feedback about leadership culture seriously, and the concerns you've raised about management style, communication, and psychological safety are not ones we take lightly. While we're not able to speak to the specifics of any individual's experience, we want to be clear: a management approach centered on the threat of termination rather than coaching and development is not aligned with who we want to be as an organization. We're committed to creating an environment where every employee feels supported, respected, and set up for success from day one. That includes holding our leaders accountable to those same standards. Thank you again for sharing your experience. If you'd like to discuss this further, please reach out to hrsupport@drfirst.com. We hear you, and we're using this as an opportunity to reflect.
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