Pros: A good engineering culture and compensation (for Romania) are above average. But I am not here to talk about this.

Cons: TLDR: The company is doing a spectacular display of power, imposing a sudden, poorly planned, and hardly justified "Return to Office" policy – 2 days a week, handling concerned employees without compassion and with a dictatorial hand. --- A very recent and abrupt rupture in CrowdStrike's philosophy. All employees working on the Product team (software engineers, testers, product managers, engineering managers, designers, etc.) are called back to the office, mandatory 2 days per week. People signed contracts in the last few years, with "100% remote work" being one of the main reasons they signed. For years, the company has functioned as "remote-first," coming to the office being completely voluntary. But now, utterly unexpectedly, one of the main strong points of CrowdStrike (all infrastructure and processes adapted for 100% remote work) has been canceled, ripped apart by the "senior leadership / exec team." This has been such a bad, deceitful, inconsiderate move against employees, without any kind of survey or even a decent argument/motivation from the exec team. Immoral and unethical on all dimensions – from the way they basically fooled everyone with the "remote-first culture," to the way they phrased the sudden email announcing it, or the short timeline when it must take effect (within 1 week), to how they "handled" people who voiced concerns, or even the undersized offices in most cities (because they hired like crazy remotely, but offices remained so small, unprepared for everyone having Zoom meetings all day – because you still need to work with other countries). Leadership motivated with "keeping the culture" or "speeding up onboarding" or "facilitating random conversations" or "better collaborations." It doesn't even make sense. Most people work very closely with people from other countries, other time zones ("remote-first," duh). In the office, most likely, you won't have close colleagues. That's okay, but you won't be able to meet over Zoom with _actual_ coworkers from another country because, in the very little time window overlap, you will be commuting. And also, who has time in the office to chat randomly, except for small talk/pleasantries? This company is making people work close to burnout. Sorry leadership, but you are not that good at holding your position. Keeping the culture? Remote culture? The one you just canceled? Ha! People have started to raise concerns against this new policy. They talked a lot publicly on Slack groups. Very civilized, some more passionate than others, but still civilized. People expressed nobody is ready to come back to the office after years of remote work within 1 week (kids? elderly in care? traffic? pollution? wasted time? small offices? no meeting rooms in offices? very basic and non-interesting offices? what about those and many other counter arguments for Return to Office?). It is just unreasonable. Exec team has just thrown this greasy bugger at us, and we now have to just eat it. People have requested a relaxation or rollback of this new policy. Many people have been documenting alternatives and elegant plans to implement this reasonably, so much more politely, considerately, and professionally than the exec team has been able to when they threw this at us. They had all the time and resources to make a better plan, but they didn't. What leadership did? Fired one of the guys who was more vehement against the change, and made another one quit. Leadership basically said, "From next week, everybody back to the office. No comments on that. Have an exception? Talk to your manager." But what shall managers do? Approve an exception for everybody? What exceptions can be approved? Managers to decide. People are commenting that the Return to Office is just a way to make people quit. Or just a cold-blooded way of micromanaging people to hit the maniacal goals of being number #1, achieving the crazily high revenue targets, and of that Wall Street bullsh*t. Such an "elegant" use of power. So disappointing. Leadership, are YOU really that underperforming that the only way to run your company is to gather the cows back in the barn? Isn't there anything smarter to try (after cutting bonuses, budgets, rushing up work, tightening deadlines, increasing the pace on all fronts)?

Pros: Community opportunities, projects, compensation, culture.

Cons: Long working hours, short staff.

Pros: Crowdstrike, bar none, is the leader in EDR. They focus on making computer abnormalities (from malware, hackers, etc.) visible and detectable, preventing them from being hidden from a user. The company acts like they want to win the market and is growing like crazy to get there. Their cloud solution is a cash cow, with numerous ways to make money. The engineers are disciplined and have a pretty good programming process. This should be expected in the security space, but sadly it may not be. I've been at security companies that cut corners in the name of deadlines. They are pretty well organized, being a geographically dispersed company. Finally, all new employees take a business course on Crowdstrike's products. The lectures are typically done by VPs and high-level engineers, and that is a very super-cool, novel "newbie training" idea. You do feel like you understand the security market more afterward.

Cons: For starters, Crowdstrike's development environment is a hodge-podge set of home-grown development tools, debuggers, test frameworks, VMs, and programming languages that frankly, I'm sometimes surprised it even works at all. You think you'll be able to rely on, say, PyCharm IDE's debugger to help you debug Python code? Nope. You'll start questioning yourself if it's worth growing your work experience in this home-grown tool environment over, say, a more industry-standard experience; gaining experience writing Java code with Jetbrains IntelliJ and using JUnit to test. Many reqs at Crowdstrike can say "C++ experience needed," but you may rarely do any C++ development and instead use a home-grown modeling language. This all can be very frustrating, as the ramp-up curve is very steep, and you cannot simply do things like go on the internet and take a programming course to accelerate your ramp-up. You really need work time and not Google to learn things. Pray that you have a manager who really understands this and is good about ramping up people the right way, which is slowly. Second, I'm not sure where managers/leadership gets the idea that, say, a Linux expert can be successful at Windows development tasks. They may label you as a "Linux resource," but in practice, it can prove otherwise. It happens more than you think. Another con is the company tends to still operate like a startup. At a 4,000+ employee, post-IPO company, they need to start acting more maturely about this. Let's get real: when COVID is over and people can leave their homes to go and do stuff (vacations, movies, jazz shows, etc.), the company will not get as many work hours out of their employees. Crowdstrike better adjust for that and reset expectations. Don't think when you are told your bonus number in your offer letter you are going to get it. More often than not, it's actually a bit harder to achieve. I've been at companies where if you work hard and management knows you at least tried and put in the effort to make a deadline, you'll get, say, a quarterly bonus. Not here. There is a huge reliance on Slack for communication. If you are not a fan of Slack, like, huge-huge, so much so people tend to forget there exists an invention called email. If there is going to be a downfall to Crowdstrike, it will be due to their home-grown tool/development environment locking the wheels of productivity when all the talent that developed those things as side projects leave the company, which could be sooner than you think after their IPO success. Finally, here is a trade-off con/pro: Crowdstrike pays well, but are you really making more money? You will most likely work from home, and Crowdstrike will only pony up a laptop and monitor; the rest (desks, ergonomics, etc.) is on your dime. I don't believe you can write off those work-related things on your tax return. And see if things like your utility bills go up as a result of working remote. My "recommendation to a friend" is really neutral. Crowdstrike is a leader in cybersecurity solutions utilizing the cloud, and you'll gain some great insight into modern cybersecurity. But remote work isn't for everyone. And Crowdstrike needs to temper down the startup mentality. And the home-grown tool/development situation isn't a great way to gain experience/expertise when you are looking for that next software engineering opportunity elsewhere.