I was hired by Druvstar at the same time as 2 others for the same position. Shortly after I found out that the longest any person in this position had worked in this position was under 6 months. This is a small company of sub 10 people. I found out that three others in this position had quit or been fired within the previous month, and that’s why three of us were hired at once. This place is extremely toxic from a culture perspective and completely ineffectual from a work perspective. Within the first month I was openly talking with my cohorts about the places we collectively were applying to.
Regarding the work itself, culture uninterested in investigating basically anything. If they have one example that is escalated and then comes back as a false positive, they will extrapolate that the entire category of a concern can never be malicious from that point forward simply because one example turned out to be non-malicious. They are lazy, don’t want to work, and just want to perform busy work to give the illusion of working. On the few occasions I pressed them to explain a decision to me, management would clearly be brushing me off by coming up with whatever random explanation that they could think of on the spot. It became a whole chore to fact check even small things management would tell me about the environment because they would invariably lie and fabricate nonsense answers. As an example: I was told that certain activity was already blocked and I should close it as a false positive and no amount of my explaining to them that it was two way traffic or that we could see the back and forth conversations to know it wasn’t being blocked would get anyone to look at it more closely. Management gave me at least 10 different reasons why it wasn’t a real issue and all were WILDLY different and all delivered in a 1 hour span. At one point I was also told if you could think of any possible way to explain an activity as legitimate that it was not worth investigating and so they would never escalate anything unless he could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was malicious and successful. They only really have one client, an Australian based gaming company, and 95% of work is for this one customer. The owner of Druvstar is on the board for the gaming company. They ONLY use RSA netwitness, which is a really bad product and honestly people make fun of me for having experience in it now.
Regarding the toxic workplace culture issues, things that have been directly told to me by management:
-If I only work my 12 hour shift that I must not care about this job, and I’m “just a seat warmer.”
-Employees shouldn’t talk about your pay because they had a previous employee that did so and he ended up getting fired for “unrelated reasons.” When I pointed out that talking about pay is legally protected the explanation changed to “it's just toxic to do so and we don’t recommend it” – I made 55k. Asking around about pay I found out that everyone was severely underpaid. The engineer who set up the environment and tools was making 58k.
-Employees shouldn’t discuss their work with coworkers or with friends and family, because what if they also work in the industry and word gets out? People might think this is a bad place to work and that might damage Druvstar’s reputation.
-I saw them openly bullying and hazing another employee over several weeks, but when I challenged them telling her the rules were different than I had been told, they said “fair for everyone doesn’t mean equal” and that she somehow deserved the way she was being treated and the hazing rules that were being applied to her alone. I also heard a lot of extremely sexist language, and as a female employee was OFTEN lumped in with the other female employee as if we had the same thoughts and the same complaints even when our experiences were wildly different. This company seems to only hire extremely inexperienced employees who have never been in a SOC before, however there is no management structure to support them. There is absolutely no training or onboarding, and the people that you are told are there to be your mentors will flat out ignore you even if you contact them with questions via email or direct message rather than asking in person. If an analyst brings questions to anyone in leadership, they will be told that they should contact all the other analysts and come to a consensus democratically on how the department wants to run. In their ideal world we just make decisions and do them without involving management or seniors. All of the analysts have the keys to the kingdom, have full control to change any app rules, alerting policy, daily work load, parsing; anything! Keep in mind that these are people who have never worked in a SOC before and are inexperienced and so have no ideal to model themselves after, and really don’t even understand the customer environment because there is never any training or onboarding.
-This company really pushes the idea of exploiting employees to do high level work for low pay under the guise of being “self-sufficient”. They expect analysts to be able to solve any engineering problems(parsing, downed services, app rules, alerting, mail eaters) at any time, without training or assistance. Within my first month I was being asked to write app rules, modify existing rules, write policies and procedures, create and implement new rules for the team and create all documentation for the environment that already existed but was undocumented. Even change the workflow for the department on my own, as the most junior employee. I felt they were trying to put us against each other and build bad blood in the department by having us manage each other. When I was hired the person who hired me subsequently and abruptly quit. I later found out through other coworkers however that this was his third time quitting. On my final day he was back on shift working at a lower position. My other member of management is best known for screaming at people, top of lungs red in the face, at work.
After about 70 days I was fired within my probationary period for the cited reason that “We can tell you are not happy here.” Per my employment agreement my probationary period was only 60 days so I by contract was not under probation at that time, but my termination letter cites probation period as the reason. I contacted their external HR rep and was IMMEDIATELY given a month severance when I sent in my termination letter and my contract. I also expect based on how they talk about and treat the other former employees that I will now be an enemy of the state and that any association with me will be seen as a scarlet letter. The former employees before me that I heard about were all abundantly slandered to me and the other workers, and was very firmly cemented as an in group/out group dynamic.
Update to review: This review keeps getting reported and removed every few months. Since I was let go I have heard through the grape vine of 3 other employees leaving, in only 3 months time since me. I also had a friend who contacted me to let me know they applied as a Pen Tester for druvstar, and after a lengthily interview process for that specific position they were offered a job as an analyst for very little pay so they could "cross train" them as a pen tester and he could work his way up to that position. He thought he was being scammed and found out I had worked there. I confirmed he was being scammed. I also heard that it was requested of the current employees to write reviews and now there are two extremely short 5 star reviews, lol.
