Walmart

High compensation: Salaries and bonuses are very competitive, especially for senior-level technical roles.

Strong engineering talent: Many smart and capable engineers to learn from and collaborate with.

Modern tech stack: Exposure to cutting-edge technologies, tools, and large-scale distributed systems.

Support for innovation: Encouraged to experiment and propose new solutions in areas like InfoSec, DevOps, and infrastructure.

Opaque HR and compliance processes: In my experience, terminations related to alleged policy violations can occur without clear communication, documentation, or prior warnings. I was fired for doing something I did for almost the past 10 years and never received any warning.

Open-door process offers limited recourse: While Walmart promotes an open-door policy, in practice it can feel perfunctory. Concerns about terminations are often met with a reiteration that policy was violated, without meaningful discussion, explanation, or corrective options.

Digital Citizenship training not clearly enforced: Policies cited in termination were not well-aligned with the training provided, creating ambiguity around expectations.

Limited recourse post-termination: Difficulty obtaining documentation or recourse through official channels after being let go.

Risk of being blindsided: Even high-performing employees can be terminated suddenly without formal performance issues, which may create a culture of uncertainty.

If rumors are true that the board of directors alerted the CISO, Jerry Geisler, about a potential data leak originating from the InfoSec organization, then the response that followed—terminating employees for performing Active Directory lookups of laid-off colleagues—appears more focused on optics than substance.

These terminations, which were justified under broad company policy violations, give the impression of scapegoating rather than addressing the root cause.

If no malicious intent was found and the actions in question were never clearly prohibited in training, the response seems disproportionate.

Leadership should prioritize transparency, fair process, and systemic improvements over reactive measures designed to shift blame. A healthy security culture depends on trust, not fear.