CrowdStrike

Overall, great compensation, which is heavy on the equity, but it's RSUs. Individual contributors and a large subset of direct and middle management are incredibly smart, capable, kind, and thoughtful.

Remote-friendly, formerly remote-first. Cybersecurity is a growing field, and the work is interesting. There are opportunities for learning through your work, depending on your team.

Upper leadership now sees engineering as a cog in the wheel and is requiring that nearly all hiring be outside of the US, despite much of the engineering team being scattered remotely across the US.

They also attempted to roll out a stack ranking system just before the layoffs. Diversity in engineering is non-existent.

Engineering is never given enough time to address technical debt and scale issues, and is inundated by new and sometimes useless features and products that may drive ARR or retain high-paying customers. Upper leadership says they're committed to quality, but don't prioritize latent security issues and laid off over half of the QA staff even after July 19. Engineering strategy for quality focuses on reactive rather than proactive.

Scope creep is constant. The SDLC is one-size-fits-all, or rather one-size-fits-one, and tons of overhead and checkboxes rather than helping with execution. There are no success metrics tied to products or projects, and therefore no accountability. Several products or projects have few customers, but are still kept running and funded by leaders who tell tall tales. The company has been around long enough that new leaders reinvent the wheel to make a name for themselves, building atop existing tech debt, and tenured, ineffective employees can continue to ride on early successes without being productive.

Disagreeing with leadership and committing is a daily occurrence.

Stop trying to be a bottom-up organization when you're truly a top-down one.

Do actual organizational planning and prioritization so teams aren't pulled in multiple directions and overworked.

No, teams cannot just do all the things because you give them headcount.

Move from Waterfall to Agile and accept MVPs as a must-do while giving engineering teams time to address tech debt and scale.