Tenable

• Support for flexible and remote work on some teams
• Okay pay
• Okay benefits

• Loss of culture
• Management more interested in saving face than what is best for the customer
• Unwillingness to say no if it might hurt career advancement
• Decreasing care about the employee in favor of company profit and the bottom line
• Increased proclivity toward decisions based on buzzwords rather than solid, consistent decision making

In the simplest terms, Tenable has a leadership problem, particularly at the middle management level within the product and engineering organizations. If senior leadership continues to allow these orgs to continue on their current trajectory, mismanaging the products and teams of this company -- and with that the reputation those products have created for it -- any, and likely all, goodwill engendered by the historic reputation the company has earned, will be lost.

This company used to have a consistent ethos around why we built the products we did. This was due to the majority of the company, in one form or another, having strong knowledge of the problem domain these products operate in.

This ethos has been traded for appearance's sake, to say "we grew" and to pursue the goal of being "first to market". This growth is near meaningless if you don't have the right people in place, and I am convinced that Tenable no longer has the right people in place. They traded knowledge of the industry and a solid engineering foundation for smoke and mirrors.

Hiring managers allowed themselves to be overwhelmed with resumes boasting Silicon Valley experience and household names rather than solid, demonstrable experience. Bad hires lead to more bad hires. The true cost of this has been far more than their wasted yearly salaries. It likely has yet to be fully realized.

We have engineering leadership that fails to vet and properly push back on technical decisions being pushed, and effectively made, by other organizations.

We have leadership that takes credit for their teams' work and accepts awards they did not rightfully earn.

We have leadership too afraid to tell team members they might be wrong or that their idea/approach lacks merit. Rather, they insist on giving "wins" to people, even when better ways present themselves. This is not mentorship as they think. This is not providing growth in any meaningful way.

The ultimate result is a spineless, flat system, with everyone spending hours arguing over nonsensical design decisions while keeping their managers in the dark by telling them that everything is fine and under control. This leadership has neutralized all value in positions and titles by removing hierarchical systems meant, and proven, to create consistency and proper flow via spheres of responsibility. This has resulted in near-infinite amounts of churn and a complete halt of all velocity.

Simply put, there is no actual leadership. There is a bunch of people too afraid to set direction and insist on it being followed.

There is a propensity for rewriting history and changing narratives to suit the needs of the speaker. Major incidences of mismanagement combined with disingenuous "everything is fine" and "we need to maintain a unified front" blanket statements, have created a toxic atmosphere where there is no longer trust in what we hear in all-hands, product road-map, or similar type meetings.

Telling me "everything is fine" when I can clearly see it is not, is nothing short of management treating the majority of the company as idiots that don't know night from day. The real result is many of the employees simply not trusting anything from any of them. If I get honest truth when things are bad, that has the side effect of being able to trust and believe when they say things are going good.

The implications of this leadership deficiency are deep, impacting our culture, technology, and personnel.

Culture:

When I accepted the offer to work for Tenable, I stepped into a small, focused team that knew exactly the direction they were going and, more importantly, why they were going there. This was a company that didn't need corporate hype, mission statements, or fancy five-point systems to outline their values. Those items were woven into the very fabric of the teams.

Why we operated the way we did. Why a tool like Nessus was produced to begin with. Why our customers resonated with us to go from open source and free, to closed source and paid when Tenable was formed. All our success came from a shared energy, from a common goal of securing networks and providing teams with the best product to do it. There was a genuine desire to innovate for the good of the user, to pursue that common goal.

My first years here weren't driven by buzzwords and following the crowd. We were interested in foundational engineering with solid return for our users, and we knew it was the right path because many of the engineers had been users. We knew it was the right path because we were offering value and better solutions than our competitors. We weren't trying to trap people into buying from us, simply because we were "first to market" and there were no other options. We weren't interested in purchases just because it existed regardless of how good or bad the product was.

From the top to the bottom, the core question around any decision was: "How will this affect our customers? Does this represent the core values and goals of this product?". We wanted to succeed and to get sales because we were the best of the options, not just because we were the only option.

This culture of being engineering-driven and user-focused has been lost. It has been traded for focus on the bottom line and focus on buzzwords and group-think mass following. There is no longer any thought to the core values or core problems we face as a company and team. I have seen decisions made that leave our users out in the cold, while we waste time and money on needless redesigns and a rewrite of a major layer of the application. A decision that was, and still is, without foundation or merit in even the most generous technical evaluation -- and worse, no one is doing any checks and balances or holding anyone accountable for that waste of company money and mistreatment of our user base. This has jeopardized our customer happiness and success while making them wait even longer than already endured for promised features.

Ultimately, we have lost a grasp on why we do what we do. There has been a distinct shift in our focus going from a dedication to solving the most complex problems in Vulnerability Scanning and Management to being "First to market", without thought or concern over the core values we are supposed to be following or the quality of that first iteration. The reality is that being first to market has never guaranteed anything. In fact, I would argue quite the opposite; most often the first to market just means the first to be supplanted by the innovators following behind, filling the gaps the initial rush left exposed. Google supplanted AltaVista, Facebook supplanted MySpace, and IE supplanted Navigator.

Being first means nothing without a solid foundation and commitment to why we do what we do. This "why" is the very core of any company culture. That used to be Tenable. I can't say it is anymore.

This is the prime point to be made: the culture of this company has been lost. The desire for fast, efficient applications allowing the user the shortest path to actionable information, has been lost. In my estimation, this company will not reach its full potential and success until we start putting the customers first again. They need to truly evaluate the company and embrace this simple principle: know who you are, know why you created the products to begin with, and go back to acting in ways to remain in line with that "why".

Technology:

When I stepped into my role here as a software engineer, there was a simple and direct guiding principle: we were engineers first. This means we approached all decisions and foundational architecture with a single-dimensional focus: "What is the problem to be solved?"

Engineering is fundamentally about problem-solving, not trying new things for the sake of change, simply developing a product, or doing things for the mere sake of being in the "in crowd". We identified the problem, identified a set of possible solutions, and performed full due diligence to determine which of them, if any, held merit for solving the problem before us. This rigor has been lost. Instead, decisions are made in hasty, baseless ways, often relying on popular vote versus any sort of cohesive technical process.

Most teams have a lead, and most major focus areas have high-level technical experts. I have watched as they have been ignored and/or so restricted in the allowed processes as to be rendered useless. In most cases, the result of a decision is all but determined before the question is finished being asked, reducing the conversation, at its basest level, to lip service because "oh yeah, I have a principal engineer or technical director I need to include." If our goal was the best tech stack to solve a particular problem, then there should be no restrictions on the domain set considered, but I have personally witnessed the exact opposite on more than one occasion. The unavoidable conclusion is that decisions that should be based on technical merit are more often abandoned for what is most popular according to the general community or what is considered most acceptable to higher levels of management.

The overarching philosophy of the current middle management overseeing the engineering teams is to follow the rest of the lemmings without regard to where they are going or how high the cliff will be. This is dangerous and has landed us entirely at the whim of the popular opinion of the broader technical community without regard to the objective merits of said direction.

Personnel:

All of this has culminated in a serious situation. This company was built on products produced by solid, experienced engineers. The leadership problems, and their related downstream effects, have created a scenario where these most tenured engineers, and their significant amounts of experience and domain knowledge, have been marginalized to the point of being silenced or quitting. Rather than being leaned on to tap their knowledge and to help innovate and guide the current products into the next generation of flagships, they are treated as archaic, bitter, and to quote one person, "inmates running the asylum." This has a distinct and unavoidable impact on morale.

We used to be a company where individual effort and work was recognized and awarded. In my early years here, I received comp days, random one-off bonuses, and general recognition of a job well done. There was a time when no one would be given significantly increased roles and responsibility without commensurate compensation and promotion.

Now Tenable is a company of overwork, and only the most visible (e.g., Customer Support, sales, or management) get recognized, while the engineers on the ground are expected to be on call 24/7. It is now acceptable to have people do jobs "to prove they can do them" without requisite pay and promotion to go with the increased duties.

Now Tenable is a company that changes significant employee benefits for the sake of the bottom line without thought or concern for the impact to the employee. And as I found out when I gave my notice, they are now a company that does NOT pay fully earned bonuses for previous quarters because the employee quit before the next payout date.

Overvaluing the bottom line and undervaluing the employee will never build trust from the employee to the company. Without trust, you cannot build solid teams.

Over the years working at Tenable, I have watched as one decision after another has slowly undermined the integrity of this company and its products. I hope that perhaps this review will be taken with enough weight to perhaps introduce change. I hope the areas that drove me and so many other great engineers to part ways with this company will be addressed and changed. I hope that Tenable becomes a great place to work again. But I suspect it won't. I suspect this review will be removed and hidden in an attempt to save face. I suspect instead of listening to the honest voice of people that gave so much to the success of this company, only the voice of the "enlightened Silicon Valley elite" will be listened to. That the normal employee will continue to be considered bitter and jaded ... and perhaps we are, but management (and any prospective candidate who happens to read this) has to ask themselves: how did that happen?