Duo Security reviews

Duo at this point has an identity crisis, being stuck with the worst of Cisco’s policies and having a culture that does not work well with them. Promotion opportunities are scarce in engineering, and is often times used to up level people who are drastically under-leveled from their date of hire instead of appropriately leveling people from the outset and using promotions to appropriately reward people performing at the next level. This is exacerbated by the fact that Duo is rarely given appropriate budget to promote even those people. What’s worse is it seems like Duo management is frequently misled by senior management (Unsure if this is as high as Cisco leadership, but at the very least it seems as though VP’s were misled). During the transition to annual reviews the story went from “this will fix all of our leveling problems” to “we should have enough to appropriately reward high performers” to “we can change the titles of under leveled people and barely get them to bottom of band”. Tech at duo is also geriatric. Nobody else in the industry uses Twisted Python, so you’ll end up amassing quite a bit of useless knowledge that will not be remotely useful at your next job. Recognition of the fact that using esoteric frameworks for the majority of internal development is met with derision sprinkled with sugar. Incrementalism will not ever result in solutions that Duo needs. This is the core of the reason why so much key talent has left. I waited a while after leaving to make sure I wasn’t just upset about the situation, but here I am months later still feeling the need to warn others who are lured in by the “kinder than necessary” value that you will be continuously beat over the head with. Companies who are actually good to work for don’t have to make it one of their values to play nice. Duo is in denial of exactly how difficult it can be to work there and uses it’s own values to dismiss criticism. Ego sum auctoritate, ergo erratis.

The smaller cons of working at Duo included - huge pushbacks in changing design patterns, often using the "it's too hard for people to switch/learn" excuse even for simple changes, which I don't agree with - dated technology internally (it's getting better) - some small amounts of security theater, like a hard lockdown on slack integrations/webhooks and productivity tools - now they only do annual review cycles - when I left, I pushed my new start date off 3 weeks to get stock on the day I was told they would be deposited, but they were mistaken and I missed out on ~5k in stock. Still pretty salty about that one. Now, the big one that was the deal breaker for me... TLDR: If you have the ambition and aptitude to move quickly in your career, Duo is not the place for you. I was given excuses multiple times that never lined up and this was the ultimate reason for me leaving. I waited a month after I left to write this review as I didn't leave under the best circumstances, and wanted to make sure my thoughts/feelings were valid. As I mentioned in the Pros, it's a stable place to work. However, you have to be pretty content with where you're at in your career to stay at Duo for a long period. Most of the recent departures that I had heard of were all due to lack of recognition/promotion (including mine). To give a bit more context, I was hired in as a Software Engineer II. From early on, I was told I probably should have been hired at level III, since Duo was still operating under the "higher low and promote quick if needed" mentality of a startup. The acquisition made this difficult. When it came time for the "focal" review period, I was told I was hired too soon to get a promotion. The next year, I was told there was no budget. My manager was great and sought out an open position internally at SEIII, which I applied for and was hired onto that team. I didn't want to move teams necessarily, but that's what it took to get the promotion, so I did it. Now later on, I was going for the SE IV (senior) position. After doing a gap analysis on what they expect a IV to achieve and showing I was ready, I was told it was too close to my last promotion. I did some digging and found there was no rule about that, to which management replied there was no budget. A month later, Duo had it's largest cycle of promotions yet. And on confrontation about that, management told me it was because I lacked the technical expertise for an SE IV, even though I had done a gap analysis and was being sought out in several areas for expertise. All that said, the biggest con of working at Duo is the difficulty in moving up. Recognition is not well managed and is often results in losing employees.