viaForensics was great but NowSecure lost its "karma" - werkgeversreview Engineering bij NowSecure

Upper management is truly chaotic and gives the impression that they are not sure what they are doing. There is a change of direction pretty much every 3-5 months, which makes little sense given the current position of the company in the market. The CEO would often get input from high-end customers or return back from conferences, and immediately change the company or a product direction to please those customers. While the flexibility of doing so is okay in a startup with 10 people, it is less the case when you have 65 of them. It also creates confusion and chaos when it then goes down the management ladder, because those ideas are often not well defined, resulting in dysfunctional disconnects that few people take responsibility for eventually. Some engineering decisions are totally unilateral, and the recent overall product strategy makes no sense. Engineering and product leadership is a joke, and is completely disconnected from the reality of what's happening in the dev teams themselves, either because they seem to not care at all, or because they have no security background and/or knowledge to drive those decisions in the first place. It used to be a time when feedback in the company was valued and encouraged, but it is not the case anymore. A handful of people now make the decisions, rarely backed up by actual business cases, but rather because a new technology is shiny and trendy and something that they know how to write some code in. The company culture became really toxic. This is due to several factors in my opinion: Firstly, NowSecure tried to grow way too fast, without thinking of the consequences it would have on the culture and the company itself. It led to hiring people that were not necessarily qualified, and then have those people compete hard for attention and recognition. Some of those people don't hesitate to make it personal in order to try to make you feel bad and attack your character instead of sticking to the professional points that should be made. Secondly, trusting upper management became harder and harder. They often say they want to be transparent and open and yet, there is a very strong culture of the secret there. People talk behind your back, and IMs are not private. Promises made by upper management in my case were not kept, and their word became meaningless after a while. They often use the "startup" argument both ways. When something is not working well in the company, they blame it on the fact that they are a startup and super small (which is not true anymore given how long this company has been running and the number of people). When they want to attract talent, they play the card of the cool startup where everything is well and that will be very different than the corporate world. You can't have it both ways. Definitely some favoritism there. Some people are given up to 3-4 different chances to work out in the company, moving from team to team freely, while some competent people are let go without any remorse. Some people can work from home when they want to, some people can't. Some people are given opportunities to grow in the company simply because they talk louder than the people that actually deserve the recognition. It feels like this company is going towards the route of pure marketing of its products and image and lost its excellent vision and drive for innovation towards its products that made it great in the first place. The turnover rate is ridiculously high and definitely shows how chronically dysfunctional this company is at the moment. Not to mention that it doesn't help your company culture either.