Tenable

Good pay and benefits. Great stock purchase plan. Work/life balance usually very good.

Where do I start?

Tenable is insanely bureaucratic and cliquish. As an engineer, you often can't accomplish anything besides very menial tasks unless you schmooze with all the right people for days and weeks in advance. And even then, brace yourself for someone coming on the scene and deciding that the linting library you wanted to add offends his sensibilities for whatever reason.

Any really interesting work will be given to certain people, so any cool project you hear about in a meeting you can forget about. You won't be working on that. I actually became a worse engineer in years that I worked at Tenable because I very rarely had any challenging work (despite being told constantly that we had a lot of great stuff coming up--my big chance was always just around the corner!).

Leadership and product planning is totally chaotic. They do a "reorg" every quarter or two. It has become a company-wide joke. They barely release a product before scrapping it and reengineering it. Part of this is because there is zero discovery process before starting a project.

So a bunch of engineers are simply told to get cracking on something, and then a year down the line they realize that it doesn't meet customer needs, the data is crap, the infrastructure is overloaded, there's redundancy with other products, etc. This feels like a company that started out with a successful core product and since then has mostly been coasting on the fact that there's a lot of activity in the cybersecurity space generally.

There is almost no upward mobility or career growth that I've witnessed. The occasional person will get a promotion to Principal long after they've earned it, but for most, engineering is a ghetto--their skills are mostly wasted and their energy is spent on dealing with multiple levels of disorganized management and countless reorgs.

Finally, documentation is consistently terrible. And testing practices aren't much better. It is so frustrating to watch a large organization with thousands of employees behave like a first-year startup with 10 employees when it comes to docs and testing.

I think it's implied above.