Proofpoint

• Market leading products.
• Very unique data/challenges due to product and market position.
• Some great people.
• Generally good work/life balance.

• Low morale and burnout in multiple engineering groups for a variety of reasons:

  • Poor to non-existent engineering vision from management and executives. Engineer lead initiatives are ignored.
  • Teams have to work with productivity destroying tooling; executives don't care enough to invest in substantive improvements. As an example, work that should take minutes take hours or days.
  • High turnover and understaffing in Operations severely impairs the ability of engineers to deliver. Time is frequently spent doing things operations should handle, or waiting on availability.
  • Weak and ineffective middle management.
  • High pressure to deliver on severely understaffed teams.
  • Constant priority churn.
  • Many key engineers looking for the exit.
  • Excellence in engineering simply isn't in the leadership vocabulary.

• Office politics becoming major problem. Result is creation of engineering silos, and secrecy so teams don't lose their favored project.

• Expensive health care

• No 401k match

If you want to keep customers happy and hit the 1B goal:

• Invest in technical and managerial engineering leadership. The problems are deeply rooted and are unlikely to be fixed without substantive investments across the board. Large cash infusions can staunch the bleeding, but must be paired with actually fixing the issues. Else the inability to retain and attract key talent will continue.

• Operations needs to at least double in size. Expect to pay for talent -- the problems in operations have had a direct impact on the company as has been demonstrated by one customer impacting outage after another.

• Stop the lip service and act on engineering advice. The answer is not more data to study the issue, the answer is addressing root causes. The problems are neither new nor unique to Proofpoint.