NowSecure Reviews

3.1

45% would recommend to a friend

(52 total reviews)

Alan Snyder

53% approve of CEO

41% positive business outlook

NowSecure has an employee rating of 3.1 out of 5 stars, based on 52 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The NowSecure employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

52 reviews
1.0
4 Sept 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Mobile Security is not going away and represents tremendous opportunities in the future, which theoretically places this company in a good spot inside that space. Working in this field is quite interesting and challenging. Some teams (HR, design, R&D/Dev, services, VP of Strategy/IP Protection) have great synergies and it's truly a pleasure to interact with them. Chicago is a nice city to live in (even though they are not located in Chicago per say). Decent ping-pong players there :)

Cons

Upper management is truly chaotic and gives the impression that they are not sure what they are doing. There is a change of direction pretty much every 3-5 months, which makes little sense given the current position of the company in the market. The CEO would often get input from high-end customers or return back from conferences, and immediately change the company or a product direction to please those customers. While the flexibility of doing so is okay in a startup with 10 people, it is less the case when you have 65 of them. It also creates confusion and chaos when it then goes down the management ladder, because those ideas are often not well defined, resulting in dysfunctional disconnects that few people take responsibility for eventually. Some engineering decisions are totally unilateral, and the recent overall product strategy makes no sense. Engineering and product leadership is a joke, and is completely disconnected from the reality of what's happening in the dev teams themselves, either because they seem to not care at all, or because they have no security background and/or knowledge to drive those decisions in the first place. It used to be a time when feedback in the company was valued and encouraged, but it is not the case anymore. A handful of people now make the decisions, rarely backed up by actual business cases, but rather because a new technology is shiny and trendy and something that they know how to write some code in. The company culture became really toxic. This is due to several factors in my opinion: Firstly, NowSecure tried to grow way too fast, without thinking of the consequences it would have on the culture and the company itself. It led to hiring people that were not necessarily qualified, and then have those people compete hard for attention and recognition. Some of those people don't hesitate to make it personal in order to try to make you feel bad and attack your character instead of sticking to the professional points that should be made. Secondly, trusting upper management became harder and harder. They often say they want to be transparent and open and yet, there is a very strong culture of the secret there. People talk behind your back, and IMs are not private. Promises made by upper management in my case were not kept, and their word became meaningless after a while. They often use the "startup" argument both ways. When something is not working well in the company, they blame it on the fact that they are a startup and super small (which is not true anymore given how long this company has been running and the number of people). When they want to attract talent, they play the card of the cool startup where everything is well and that will be very different than the corporate world. You can't have it both ways. Definitely some favoritism there. Some people are given up to 3-4 different chances to work out in the company, moving from team to team freely, while some competent people are let go without any remorse. Some people can work from home when they want to, some people can't. Some people are given opportunities to grow in the company simply because they talk louder than the people that actually deserve the recognition. It feels like this company is going towards the route of pure marketing of its products and image and lost its excellent vision and drive for innovation towards its products that made it great in the first place. The turnover rate is ridiculously high and definitely shows how chronically dysfunctional this company is at the moment. Not to mention that it doesn't help your company culture either.

1.0
3 June 2015

Nice People But Worst Job Of My Career

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

People trying to do the right thing. CEO is nice. Not a bad thing to say about them on a personal level. Good goal.

Cons

Can't add much to what's been said. Full of confusion, false starts and turnover. Hope they can improve the focus because the goal is a good one. They definitely make decisions without thinking through the consequences. Definitely into marketing buzz about things instead of what "works."

1.0
3 Nov 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

viaForensics is a company with potential: they have some terrific talent, ideas and honorable goals. I met several friendly and smart people while working here.

Cons

Their leadership does not know how or is unwilling to: - plan and define requirements for projects - hire appropriate talent and form effective teams - treat all employees with fairness and respect and enforce policies evenly - communicate such that everyone knows what is expected of them - create a work environment that is conducive to software development - select appropriate technologies for a given project As a result, you have chaos, wasted time and effort, lost productivity, and general dissatisfaction among employees. The company provided me with many "firsts" in my career, and none of them positive. I had never seen people lose their composure during stand-up meetings before. I had never been treated with disrespect and contempt before. I had never lost a night's sleep over a project before. I had never left the office with my hands shaking in frustration before. I had never seen someone fired out of the blue without warning or discussion until working here. They frequently hire people for one thing and make them work on something else that they are ill-suited for. I was hired as a Python dev, but I spent over a year writing javascript. I frequently explained that I am a backend engineer, that I have zero interest or expertise i building user interfaces or front-ends, yet many of my projects involved designing and building UIs. Other Python devs were disappointed to find themselves inexplicably stuck hacking javascript or something else completely unrelated to the job for which they were hired. The office is cramped, loud and lit like a hospital operating room. Almost everyone stares at backlit screens all day and the glare is horrendous. Some people are allowed to work from home while others are not. There are no generally applicable rules on this; it is completely arbitrary. Their technological decisions are based almost entirely on slick marketing and personal religions and have little to do with technical merit or fitness for a particular use case. Dissenting opinions are ignored or shouted down with personal attacks and non-sequiturs. In a disappointing yet unsurprising conclusion, my employment was capped with a sloppily drafted, nonsensical and one-sided separation agreement. The contract prohibited me from speaking critically of the company under any circumstances, yet the company was free to slander, badmouth or sue me without limitation. They stubbornly refused to negotiate on any of their terms, so I did not sign it. On the bright side, it enabled me to write an honest review and post it here.

avatar
NowSecure Response
11y
Thank you for your passionate review! Our company mission is to advance mobile security worldwide, which is no small feat. We solve incredibly complex problems, requiring a great deal of engineering power and organizational skill to develop. In the last year alone we have nearly doubled in size. Like many technology startups we have experienced some growing pains. We employ very talented engineers who are passionate about what they do and share in our mission. We in turn try our best to accommodate different work styles while maintaining efficiency and productivity. We have taken your feedback into account and will make internal adjustments accordingly. If you would like to discuss in more detail please don’t hesitate to reach out directly at 312-878-1100. Thank you and we wish you the best of luck.
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Glassdoor has 54 NowSecure reviews submitted anonymously by NowSecure employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if NowSecure is right for you.