Energy, excitement, stress, great people, and hard work
Pros
Smart, passionate people. The engineering team here is incredible. Cloudlock has done a great job of attracting some of the best talent in the area. I'm proud to be here. The engineering challenges are exciting. We have to both add new-ish tools (ansible, vagrant, docker, a bajillion AWS services) as well as deepen our control over and understanding of our core platform languages and tools (Linux, Python, Java, rabbit/celery, AngularJS, git). High throughput, low latency, and stability all while rolling out new features every week. It's obvious the upper management cares on a personal level about making CloudLock a cybersecurity leader as well as a top-notch place to work. They care about the employees and devote resources to making us happy, giving us a nice space to work in, expanding our offices, and being open about the state of the company and our competition, etc. I notice and appreciate all of these things. The company promotes the cloud as an enabler for all businesses, and walks the walk. You won't find an Exchange or Active Directory locked away in a server room. We don't even have a server room! Everything is cloud-hosted, from our HR/benefits, our email/calendar, all our servers. Management is open-minded about the responsible sharing of information, as I am doing here (I hope!). The open culture and social outreach is a big part of what motivated me to apply here in the first place.
Cons
I think being in any startup is inherently stressful -- there's constant pressure to move faster and one-up the competition, while balancing quality and avoiding mistakes. And we do make serious blunders from time to time. We need to do a better job of openly talking about the engineering and other mistakes we've made and what we're doing to fix problems going forward. Both the interview and new hire process were kind of disorganized. I think there's effort afoot to improve the new hire training. We could do a better job of standardizing the interview process and discussing/interviewing prospective hires. Managing code styles, deployment practices, releases, etc. over a dozen internal teams and repos and across at least four different timezones (US Eastern, UK, Israel, and Ukraine) is a challenge. Our codebase is already much too large for any one person to be able to know it all. And by the time she learned it, it would have doubled in size again. We need to work on standardizing code, QA, documentation, and releases across teams. Documentation is in many cases poor, outdated, or nonexistent.
