Pros
When Cofense was PhishMe and still riding off the wave of being an up and coming startup, things were great: almost entirely remote company, unlimited PTO, and annual meet ups for team cohesion. I also learned a lot about how one should never get too comfortable at a company because things can turn on a dime and boy did they ever.
Cons
It all started around 2 years ago. PhishMe got sold to Blackrock and re-branded to Cofense. Within 9 months we had a huge RIF, but it was mostly sales people. Or so it seemed. Cofense’s bread and butter in terms of revenue had always been PhishMe. Around this same time, new features and enhancements are added to PhishMe. Technical support was able to review these changes before it went live and mentioned to leadership many times that it still was buggy and not ready for production. Then they just decided to release the changes one day. Without saying anything. The support team found out by people creating tickets over the same bugs and issues we noticed. In some instances, mass emails were sent out to customers before letting support know the feature was available and that they are expected to deal with it now. Major developers and engineers left shortly after the big RIF in 2018. Management decided instead to outsource a lot of these new feature developments to another country. What this did was essentially create a development blackhole where an entire team of developers were building features for a product they had no real access to and had no idea as to the scale they should be building these features for. This created a vicious cycle where a poor development environment (created under the guise of saving money) deployed changes that broke more features than they fixed, exponentially increasing the number of user submitted support tickets and JIRA tickets the support team had to submit to the developers to fix. Meanwhile, our phones for technical support wouldn’t stop ringing off the hook, so our support team turned off the phone line entirely in 2018 and it’s been going straight to voicemail ever since. Customers would create tickets over issues that would take months to fix. Some issues took literal years. Some issues that were first broken in 2018 from these changes are still broken to this very day. Certain customers literally got tired of waiting for us to fix it and just didn’t renew their contact and left. Then development would see they’re no longer a client and close the corresponding JIRA ticket as resolved. That’s one way to resolve a technical issue, I guess. But by 2019, it was apparent that competition had caught up. We were getting way fewer license renewals or new license requests for PhishMe than we were in 2017 and 2018 and instead of those tickets it was just being replaced with bug reports we had very little control over most of the time. In summer of 2019, we had comprehensive and fair performance reviews with management. And we got raises! That was unexpected, given what was happening. Then within 2-3 months of getting these fairly glowing performance reviews for most people in the company, there is YET ANOTHER RIF and it was almost exactly a year after the first major one. This RIF wasn’t just the sales people though, it hit everywhere and in every direction. Lots and lots of people were literally laid off right before thanksgiving. Not as many as before in sheer numbers, but it was managers of multiple departments, consultants, and other long time, loyal employees, including the person who initially referred me. One of our coworkers who was 9 months pregnant was also laid off. Our CEO had a huge but completely unprofessional and pathetic webinar announcing the changes. Invoking Orwellian terminology like calling it a “right-sizing”, he basically told us that everyone who had just been laid off were laid off because they were no longer needed or had poor performance. Even though many of these people JUST had gotten glowing annual performance reviews just a couple of months prior. Then all of the horrible changes started in early 2020. Then they took away the ability to work from home. Anyone within 50 miles of a corporate office HAD to go in the office to work. And yes, they forced employees to show up with clipboards and take attendance. As if you were in highschool. This policy was global. It applied to every office in every country. Employees in the UK suddenly had to deal with 2-3 hour commute times JUST to get into an office for a job that is 100% behind a computer screen. This was all Pre-COVID-19, so all of those astroturfed reviews saying that cofense “seamlessly transitioned from working in the office to WFH” ignore the fact that this was only done because a literal global pandemic forced the company back to being remote. In 2020, our new director announced that our support team would finally be getting the helped that it needed: they were going to start outsourcing support to the Philippines. But they swore up and down it wouldn’t lead to the elimination of any of our jobs. I decided to no longer take my chances and left after employee morale had all but been completely destroyed.
