Good culture, poor engineering, byzantine software processes
Pros
BlueCat has two main products -- I'm writing from the perspective of an engineer on the newer, security-centric product. - Good for interns or new grad engineers because there's lots of opportunities for any engineer to play with new technologies. Company seems to be able to afford a lot of cloud services, so you can get exposure to those. - Good for veteran engineers who don't really care about improving their skills and just want a cushy job to collect a pay cheque because it's so easy to fly under the radar producing no useful work. - Culture is positive and I got the feel that most people were trying their honest best to engineer well and treat each other with respect. - Decent perks like discounted food, free beer on tap, cool office, fancy corporate events. - Sales team seems to be excellent as they keep closing on deals despite the not-so-great software.
Cons
- Their newer product (security focused; meant to become the future of the company) is pretty poor from the features perspective. I've gone to multiple info sec conferences and never once heard this company mentioned. - It's also poor from the engineering perspective. It is a ridiculous over-engineered mess of nano-services. The complexity is staggering considering how little the product actually does. Most of the complex problems that engineers have to solve is not because the actual computer science / security problem is hard to solve, it's because poor planning/architecting makes everything complicated. - Features/roadmap is heavily influenced by marketing/sales, rather than being engineering/infosec-driven. We actually spent time implementing a feature that was essentially useless just so that we could add a bullet point to our product spec claiming that we use certain technologies. - Poor choice for engineers who want to improve their skills and step up to mid- or senior-level engineers. Work is constantly moving around, preventing you from actually seeing through a complex problem from start to finish. The dev process requires verbose discussion of every little decision, which kills your sense of autonomy as an engineer because anything you want to do has to appeal to the lowest common denominator - Although the culture is positive, it is so much so that people (in all divisions) seem more occupied with patting themselves on the back about anything they can spin as a 'win,' rather than actually reflecting on the product critically and making meaningful improvements.
