TLDR: Management has no idea what they are doing. If you have a chronic illness or disability, please stay far away. If you are already established in your career, your trajectory will likely be harmed by working at Doximity. If you are new in your career, you will not learn a lot of the skills and best practices that other companies will expect from you.
HR put it best when I raised the issues I’m about to describe: “Dox just isn’t a people-focused company.” They acknowledged the problems, stated nothing would be done, and explained that the CEO prefers things this way. If you’re considering a role at Doximity, I strongly recommend reading through my review and checking the other 1-3 star reviews. A consistent pattern emerges, revealing mismanagement and neglect for employee well-being going back many years.
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First, pay and benefits at Doximity are not competitive. Management openly acknowledges this, often repeating the phrase “Doximity doesn’t pay competitive salaries.” Stock grants for new employees are minimal, and securing additional shares is rare. Keep in mind that it typically takes about 5 quarters for your initial stock to start vesting, and most employees have seen their stock value decline after joining (although more recently the stock has performed better).
There are no bonuses. PTO is just 17 days (including sick days). The 401k match is capped at 3k per year, and health insurance is standard. Don’t trust recruiters when they try to spin things—they work on commission and will say whatever they think you want to hear.
Employees who joined after the IPO are treated as second-class. They receive lower pay, less time off, and seemingly fewer opportunities for advancement compared to those who were there earlier. The disparity is well known but never addressed.
Doximity’s primary revenue stream is pharma advertising. This raises obvious ethical concerns, but it also makes for a risky and unsustainable business model. Continued growth requires extracting more money from pharma each year. When they inevitably fall short, there are only so many ways to compensate, which brings me to:
Layoffs. In 2023, Doximity laid off 10% of its workforce after repeatedly assuring employees that ad sales were strong and no layoffs were coming. Instead of announcing it up front, they quietly began deactivating people’s accounts one morning. Panic spread as we watched colleagues disappear in real time, scrambling to check in on them and wondering who would be next. Management remained silent until the end of the day. Then, the very next day, they had the audacity to complain about being short-staffed and said we’d need to ramp up hiring. I would not be surprised if they do this again in the next year.
The leveling process at Doximity is opaque and dishonest. From what I was told, a single person in senior leadership makes unilateral decisions about pay and promotions for every engineer, with some input from EMs. Experience outside of Doximity is ignored—for example, someone with 20 years of experience and multiple staff-level roles elsewhere would still be hired in as a mid-level developer, or occasionally senior. Once hired, they’ll be expected to wait 6-10 years before even being considered for staff, even if they are contributing at a staff level from the start. Management justifies this by claiming they have higher standards for developers, but this is easily debunked by looking at the code base and the quality of people they promote into leadership. In reality, promotions depend far more on tenure, being part of the in-group, and senior leadership’s personal opinions of you. It's very performative and political.
Performance reviews are essentially nonexistent. Management claims some kind of review process exists, but it’s never communicated to employees, and there’s no formal structure. Even as a tech lead, I can count on one hand the number of times a manager asked me for informal feedback on a report of theirs. EMs usually aren’t on the same team as their reports, and it wasn’t uncommon to go a full month without hearing from them. Management has little to no understanding of what their direct reports or teams are actually doing. I've worked at much smaller and much larger companies than Doximity, and this is the first time I've ever encountered a company with absolutely no feedback process.
Once you’re established, work-life balance quickly deteriorates. Doximity has a way of taking over your entire life. I often wouldn’t get to eat lunch until 3 or 4 pm, if at all, and when I did it was usually during a meeting or while catching up on tasks. Colleagues frequently messaged me on Slack until up to 9 pm. Attempts at setting boundaries were generally not respected. The workload never ebbed and flowed like it does at most organizations; we were constantly at max capacity and still expected to take on more at a moment’s notice.
They operate on a quarterly system where each team sets a few goals for the whole quarter and just hopes they work out. There is no real plan, which leads to a last-minute scramble at the end of each quarter, causing significant stress for developers, straining shared resources like QA and DevOps, increasing bugs and tech debt, and ultimately leaving teams in a worse position for the next quarter’s goals. Management would notice people’s stress levels but respond with bemusement, remarking that there was no reason to be stressed out. I could never tell whether this was pure gaslighting or a genuine lack of understanding—that it’s not their words that matter, but the culture, processes, and unrealistic timelines they created. On my last team, I tried to introduce some basic agile principles for a more organized approach to planning and timelines. This was successful, but management downplayed and undermined the success. I was told directly that it was “cool but didn’t matter.”
Generally, no one knows how to run a project and product/dev leads receive no training. The company as a whole is very resistant to improvement. Retros are for talking about how great everything is—if you try to use them for continuous improvement, you’ll be labeled as negative. The only thing that matters is maintaining the status quo, no matter how dysfunctional, inefficient, unreliable, and unsustainable it is.
After the end-of-quarter crunches, all employees are required to travel to offsites. Per official policy, offsite attendance is taken into account when discussing raises and promotions, but they refuse to implement basic accommodations such as streaming or recording sessions for remote attendance.
Early in my tenure, I had to miss a few offsites while recovering from a major spine surgery, and I felt like it was held against me. One person in leadership later admitted to being upset with me for not attending, explaining he saw it as a sign of not being a “team player”.
Despite struggling with intense chronic pain, frequent injuries, and other chronic conditions, I felt pressured to attend all future offsites. The pain and stress from travel affected my ability to sleep, culminating in a trip where I stayed awake for five straight days. The whole time I was open about the difficulties I was facing and I was visibly deteriorating, but no accommodations were made or help offered. This wasn’t an isolated case. Others also felt pressured to attend despite extenuating circumstances—people with caretaking responsibilities, recent surgery, multiple broken limbs, etc. Most employees I talked to found the offsites to be an exhausting waste of time, no matter their health status. The locations can be cool, but you don’t get much time to enjoy them or time to spend with your team.
All the managers I encountered had little or no experience outside of Doximity. They struggled with basic leadership responsibilities, likely due to lacking perspective and knowledge of best practices. When faced with pushback or reasonable requests, their responses were typically denial, deflection, gaslighting, or even mockery and outright hostility. Sometimes they’d feign support, but rarely would they follow through on anything.
Another favorite phrase among management is “you’re not irreplaceable.” Want a raise? Want recognition for your work? Feeling burnt out? Get ready to hear these words. The phrasing is oddly specific and consistently used, leading me to believe that managers are trained to say it whenever employees push back.
Leadership has no vision. They rarely commit to any idea for long, and for years they reorganized teams and completely restructured every quarter or two, disrupting workflows and setting people back. At one point, a data engineer created a sprawling diagram of the company’s chaotic team structures over time. Leadership thought it was hilarious.
Sudden departures are common. I saw about ten people I knew leave the company while I was there, and all but two were suddenly gone one day. It usually wasn’t clear if they were fired or quit. After departing, former employees were often denigrated or erased. These episodes along with the layoffs created a chilling effect, where people became afraid to speak up, set boundaries, or take time off, lest they be next.
Bottom line: Doximity is, without a doubt, the most toxic company I’ve ever worked for. From day one, my experience was overwhelmingly negative, and the toll it took on my health and career is difficult to overstate. Despite my direct contributions saving the company millions of dollars, improving productivity, mentoring coworkers, and opening up new revenue opportunities, I was met with nothing but disrespect, manipulation, cruelty, and erasure. I deeply regret the time I spent there. If you value your well-being, work-life balance, stability, and basic humanity, this is not the place for you. Doximity will chew you up and spit you out.
