Pros
- Remote Work
- Cool tech stack
- Some great individual contributors
Kontras
Personally, I definitely had a '1 star' worthy experience at DrFirst due to the toxicity of the leadership I interacted with. However, I was hesitant to actually rate DrFirst as a '1 star' here since my experience was limited to the cyber security team, and I don't think it's fair to suggest that all of the various teams within DrFirst are the same way.
In my situation, I first encountered some of this toxicity on my 4th day at the company - where I was pulled into a 1 on 1 with senior security leadership, who proceeded to go on somewhat of a tangent about previous security personnel at DrFirst who they had terminated, and explicitly told me they had a '3 strike policy' and suggested they had no problem letting me go in the event I reached this ambiguous '3 strike' threshold (which was never defined). It's worth mentioning that I'm very aware that if someone doesn't do their job > they will eventually get terminated, that's a pretty widely accepted notion. But hearing these comments just 4 days after starting was pretty shocking. I was hoping this was somewhat of a one-off too, but this kind of language and management style that I perceived as heavily focused on termination risk and negative consequences rather than coaching and development persisted in just about every 1 on 1 over the course of the next month, which led me to realize I should probably get out sooner rather than later.
In addition to some of this behavior directed towards me, senior security leadership would also regularly make questionable/not-so-positive comments in passing about broader company leadership (e.g., technology leadership) - in our 1 on 1s. I wasn't sure how to respond to some of these comments, but they were also somewhat of a theme in a lot of our 1 on 1 interactions.
Another kind of crazy thing I experienced while at DrFirst was security leadership's use of Claude. I'm very pro-AI in the workplace setting (especially in the security engineering setting), but the way in which security leadership would try and leverage Claude and interpret Claude output was pretty shocking. In one instance, a security concern was escalated (by senior security leadership) based largely on Claude output. After additional investigation by individual contributors on the team, the issue was determined not to be a real security incident and appeared to stem from a misunderstanding of the model's output. That experience raised concerns for me about how AI-generated information was being evaluated before operational decisions were made and was just generally pretty wild to witness first-hand because of how trivial the hallucination was to decipher once individual contributors on the team actually saw what was going on. So, take the 'AI-first' attitude that is advertised with a grain of salt, as some of what is actually going on behind the scenes is kind of wonky.
I want to emphasize one more time that I don't think my experience at DrFirst represents the company at large, and that I think there are tons of great individual contributors at DrFirst. My immediate counterparts on the security team were genuinely awesome to work with (veryyy smart and kind people), and my encounters with HR, IT, and other teams at the company were also really positive. Unfortunately, the immediate security leadership (composed of 1 VP at the time of posting) made my time here pretty unbearable, which resulted in me accepting an offer at another firm just 6 weeks after my first day.