Tenable

Tenable used to be a fun place to work. In fact, in 2016, I left a glowing review here that gave it 5/5 stars. Unfortunately, in 2015, it sold its soul to VCs. The transition has mostly finished, and it pretty much went as expected. This review pertains solely to product/engineering, and not any of the other departments.

Everyone in top leadership seems to be here solely for the IPO. Of course, I have no idea what they’re actually thinking, but you can tell by their actions that this is roughly the plan: we will get this company to IPO, and after that, well, who cares? There is little vision, there is no leadership, but there is lots of trying to make the company palatable to investors, and drawing the veil over customers' eyes just enough to hide the problems until everyone gets their money and can move on. I don’t think anyone in leadership has run a successful company, and it shows. Unfortunately, these are the people responsible for building the other layers of management underneath them, so as you can imagine, these suffer too.

There is no real dedication to customers, nor to employees – I’m not actually sure what we’re dedicated to, besides making it through the lockup period. There is no desire to build a solid foundation or a long-lasting company. If you join Tenable, for the first 3 months you will be dazzled by all the awesome technology we use and feel that sweet new-job-feel-good buzz (which, by the way, is where I imagine all the positive reviews here come from – that, and HR’s push to improve our Glassdoor ratings; the rest of the ratings are built up from a time long gone by. Glassdoor could do with a Steam-style review system.).

After that, questions will slowly start to formulate in your mind. For example:

• Why is no one really concerned about a 5-year plan? A 3-year plan? A… 2-year plan?
• Why is our platform built to scale massively and racks up a ton in bills, but has no customers?
• Why does it fail to scale for the few huge customers that we do have?
• Why are 50% of all support tickets filed to fester in a silent void – has no one, still, to this day, figured out the proper way to reliably communicate between support and engineering?
• Why does our product try to do 20 different things at once, but does not one thing well?
• Why does every team feel like they’re in their own little silo?
• Why are the best and brightest engineers working alongside me underpaid?
• Why does everyone talk about the structural issues we have privately, but never publicly?
• Are they even allowed to?
• Could “transparency” just be a buzzword?
• Why are we trying to run a huge cloud platform with almost no documentation or a proper communication structure?

All of these questions can be answered if you think back to why the management across all levels here is incompetent: we’re going make it to IPO, after that, whoever wants to can pick up the bag.

That’s not to say everything here is woefully terrible – there are some very sharp people working here, some real awesome guys and gals, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get a chance to be in a team with them and learn from them, as I have. Unfortunately, they all seem to be taxed with constant meetings and fires, and you will watch them struggle to lift the company up, as management keeps dragging them down.

Read the cons section.