CrowdStrike

I'm extremely pro-CRWD, both as a company and in terms of its future. Overall, I feel happy to work here, but there are definite things to improve upon, which could change my rating in the future.

• Pay is pretty good (although not FAANG), and the quarterly bonus payout is a really cool feature.
• ESPP is awesome (15% discount with lookback).
• Best onboarding of my career, bar none.
• There are simply a lot of hard-working and kind people around.
• Remote-first culture.
• Generally, work-life balance is good. This is my first company where I'm never bothered on the weekends or after hours.
• Overall, the future is bright!
• This is going to sound Kool-aidy, but it's the best cybersecurity company in the industry. Our product basically sells itself.

When I was writing this out, there were more things than I initially thought, but here goes:

• I understand the pressure that leadership is under. They serve two masters: we need to fulfill our mission and keep our customers safe, but also continue to grow as fast as we can. While our customers and Wall Street frequently overlap in what they want and need, sometimes those goals don't always align. Depending on who you ask, there are a lot of focus areas and a ton of priorities: 5-year plans, speeches at quarterly All Hands, corporate and team goals, and it gets dizzying. The message is often unclear.

• I haven't been here forever, but while CrowdStrike has a ton of great people, it's filled with more than its fair share of "rest and vest" pre-IPO veterans who like to sit and complain about the good ol' days, even though they don't seem to produce much at all.

• To the point above, while I haven't been here forever, in the years I've been here, what I have seen is a leadership pullback. As the company's grown, there have been more unannounced re-orgs, execs leaving, and this and that happening with little or reactive communication, which leaves everyone wondering what's up and looking over their shoulder. Corporate comms needs to be redone with a much clearer focus on transparency.

• There is little to no training for managers, and managers aren't evaluated at all on how good they actually are as managers, so it's kind of a roll of the dice in terms of how effective your manager is and how they'll advocate for you.

• Related to the above, I cannot explain to you how and why some people get promoted and others don't. There is no track or defined process, so it's very much up in the air behind a secretive and often delayed annual merit cycle. A lot of people were frustrated this year.

• Speaking of, merit raises haven't been great lately. If I end up leaving, that will be why. Please give your top performers an incentive to stay!

• There's no educational reimbursement at all.

• 401k is embarrassingly bad for a company of our size with the revenue we generate.

All of the things I've mentioned above are things most people who've been here more than a couple of months have seen for themselves and have been telling management for quite some time. Outside of a survey once or twice a year that doesn't seem to be looked at by anyone with the power to do anything, it seems that a lot of this falls on deaf ears.