Pros
There's some good to be said about Praetorian. I don't know if COVID has changed much about it, my departure was before COVID hit. Some high points I enjoyed: - Exposure to a large number of clients, tech stacks, and projects is great for people just getting into security (fresh out of college or new to the industry). It's excellent to cut your teeth if you're intelligent and focused learning. - The pay is competitive, and if you enjoy travel there's plenty of opportunity for it in a non-COVID world. - They encourage training and certifications. - Plenty of opportunity to learn from some very intelligent people. - Flexibility to set your own schedule, very "don't care as long as your work is done well." - Private and self-funded for most of its life, up until the Series A funding in 2020. - Communication about the company's direction is frequent, with regular updates on the company's health and major initiatives.
Cons
Most of the negatives of my time at Praetorian came from experiences with clients, management, and the direction of the company (more on each below). Coworkers were always a joy to interact with, though that's not surprising - Praetorian tries to cultivate a certain personality type to match its desired culture, and that might raise concerns about diversity. It was at least almost entirely white men in my time at the company, though to their credit the recruiters were constantly fighting against larger industry demographics. I also wouldn't come here looking for a startup feel, really - a lot of the perks we've come to associate with startups in the bay area like a swanky office, foosball tables, and food are absent here. In all honesty, I felt like our office was actually kind of gross. At times it was like a college dorm. Turnover was a little high for its size, as well. During my time there were multiple instances of mass departures for various reasons, or people in prominent positions leaving without warning, like if some massive fight had happened. It always left you in a lurch, feeling like Praetorian was imploding. It's a core tenant of the company to put the client first, which is fine. The issue is in the work that you're performing for clients - you'll have multiple clients at once, and often handling requests from past clients while trying to juggle current work can eat into your already scant time. Additionally, Praetorian has a bad habit of not pushing back on unreasonable client requests, or accepting work that is uninteresting while promising interesting work in the future that never really came. One of the worst examples would be overnight work for clients (work that needed to be done from say 8 PM to 5 AM for client reasons). These jobs happened a number of times, even after management assured we would no longer accept that kind of work. Other times, the hand-off from the sales team to the services team was nonexistent, leaving the engineer in an awkward position of not really knowing the work they needed to perform as well as they should. This was on top of issues like expected weekend interviews with potential candidates or some immediate development or tooling need that took priority over your client work. Management was another sore point for me. I can't count the number of internal projects or initiatives that we tried out to improve our processes, only for that to be abandoned within a few months. Management often had contradictory information between them, or the message being conveyed would alter radically after the CEO changed his mind. Team leaders looked out for their engineers as best they could, but it was a chaotic environment. During my time, there were some intended new upper level hires to combat this, but those new hires just never really materialized after multiple years. There also was a huge culture shift towards the corporate after Praetorian took on its series A funding from McKinsey, a company that gives me massive ethical concerns because of their ties to multiple international corruption scandals and authoritarian regimes. A lot of this culture shift came from trying to appease McKinsey as the investors. And then there was Nathan, the CEO. He's agreeable enough in person, a great public speaker, and a consummate salesperson. He's also fickle, moody, and stress-inducing at just about all times. I was never comfortable around him during my entire time at Praetorian, partly because of an incident involving him physically smashing office equipment in a rage. Read that line again. He actually took a hammer to something because he was angry. He would also sell ideas to employees that, in retrospect, might not have been the best thing to sign on to. There were times that I felt taken advantage of professionally, due to a pressure to agree to work or due to hyping up future prospects that never materialized. This is especially concerning for the fresh out of college hires that Praetorian tries aggressively to acquire, who might not know how to push back against unreasonable work amounts or ill-scoped projects. I never felt like the company was really going anywhere. Most of the day to day was spent on client work to keep the money coming in, with some major multi-year projects outside of that client work that just never produced anything inspiring confidence. Some major projects were worked on for so long without meaningful progress that it really made you question if things would ever actually see the light of day. Praetorian had an excellent track record with that day to day client work and with client satisfaction, but I had little faith in anything beyond that. Their stated goal is to "solve the cybersecurity problem," but that reality is it just felt like cheesy marketing buzz more than an actual possibility. Ultimately, I don't regret my time at Praetorian, but I don't think I'd recommend it.
