Rapid7

• Lots of interesting problems to solve.
• Very smart engineering teams, with relatively few rotten apples making it through the hiring process.
• Time and effort being allocated to upgrade and/or replace legacy components, slowly but steadily. This didn't use to be the case, but the results of this work are paying off and making for a much more pleasant developer experience.
• Great degree of autonomy. Whether you just want to take on tickets and finish them off and be left alone outside working hours, or you really want to take ownership of something from the design stage all the way through to completion, there is plenty of opportunity for both depending on what you are looking for here.
• Long-time employees in the Dublin office are getting a lot better at acknowledging that certain parts of the system are just not good and need to be fixed/replaced, whereas a few years ago there was more of a "don't insult my baby!" mentality.
• Engineers and teams as a whole get a lot of flexibility to work whatever way suits them best, so long as they manage to meet their goals. If there is a feeling that a particular way of working within the team that doesn't work very well, a lot of the time all that is needed is a verbal agreement among the members of the team in order to get things changed.
• In general engineers are given the flexibility to move around teams and projects as they see fit.
• There is a friendly, welcoming and informal culture in the office where someone is always willing to help you out or explain something to you. The office is also very diverse yet there are relatively few culture clashes.
• Very good benefits package

• Career progression happens either smoothly or gets turned into a long drawn-out bureaucratic process, depending on whether specific managers like you personally, seemingly regardless of ability. Being moved around teams/managers also seems to significantly hinder this process.

• Talk about your salary among your colleagues. Some people are getting severely screwed over, and I guarantee you the management cannot be trusted when it comes to this. The only ones that stand to gain from the taboo are managers.

• Forever playing catch-up with end-of-life runtime and framework versions. You'd think as a security company they'd be more concerned about this. Aside from the security side of things, it's also just very much not enjoyable to have to work on services that rely on frameworks for which support ended and documentation went offline over 5 years ago.

• The clique. Everyone who has worked here for any reasonable length of time will have at least a rough idea of who or what I'm talking about here.

• There is a huge degree of "not invented here" syndrome within the company as a whole. Internal competition can be good, but in reality what this actually seems to result in most of the time is hostility and grudges between offices. Within the office itself this has also resulted in a lot of hand-rolled solutions and wrappers around other solutions to problems that the industry has already solved.

The head of HR has often been heard saying "People don't quit jobs, they quit their managers." and she's right.

The Dublin office has grown a lot over the time I have been at Rapid7, and the office has faced significant challenges at various stages throughout its growth. It is long overdue for the Dublin office to get some HR on-site. People are simply not inclined to contact some HR person over in a different office who they more than likely have never met before, when issues arise.