- The CEO is a pompous, paternalistic, demeaning jerk who regularly talks proudly about people getting heart attacks if they work at his level of intensity, and threatening to fire anyone that doesn’t. His definition of intensity has nothing to do with product output, and everything to do with how stressed you appear, whether you’re awake at ungodly hours, and whether you’re on camera. He is surrounded by peers far, far smarter than him, most of whom run their own fiefdoms in the company to avoid his decadent micromanagement. There are stories of his that I am afraid to post about, even anonymously, for fear of retaliation to the people affected by his poor treatment.
- The CTO is a tragic figure. Forced to cater to an audience of one (his cultish boss, the CEO), he has no idea how to lead an engineering team and compensates with mindless metrics around PR count, epic completion rate, rank, lines of code written, and AI code percentage. Any software developer above the age of 19 in second year of a mid-tier college can tell you that lines of code has nothing to do with quality of code – it might even be inversely related – so why does he not understand that? He runs a fear-based sweatshop culture and then wonders why people see him as the devil.
- The company has a 119 (!!) page culture deck which is packed with hypocrisy and utter lies. It espouses diversity, inclusion, and merit, but rank matters above all else here - an SDE-1 will never be listened to over someone more senior. It uses terms like “25x rockstar” to describe Safe employees, a meaningless buzzword without quantifiability. It spends an awful lot of time talking about who should be fired for an onboarding deck – necessary since Safe employees turnover more than a spinning coin in midair. It claims “no doors” and “no rules”, and “unlimited PTO”, but the reality is anything but. This is a micromanaging place to work that will call you on your personal phone, and even reach out to your emergency contacts to ask you for your time while you’re on vacation.
The 5-star reviews are full of agreements with many of these points, but still give full marks. Are they coerced?
- Leadership is so profoundly incompetent and cruel that the CEO laid off almost the entire US Engineering team, and then tried to blame subordinates for it. Think of the incompetence! We can't manage you, because we don't know what you do, so when management thins out, you're gone. Collective punishment is a violation of the Geneva Convention. There was never any remote attempt to accommodate the US office. Between 7 AM threats to be on camera and forcing work on company holidays like Christmas and New Years Day, even from sick employees, Safe treated the US engineers as subhuman from day one. No amount of candy, merch, or talking points can fix that level of resentment.
- Above all else, Safe Security sees engineers – and employees in general – as fundamentally untrustworthy tools. A regrettable cost in the way of profit. Like a fountain pen or a toothbrush, at the nanosecond you lose your utility to leaderships’ irrational, paranoid minds, you will be out. Immediately. This paranoia shows up in the way layoffs take place; it shows up in the way engineers are expected to be able to deliver across the stack, even in places they have no experience, just so that every person is inherently replaceable; it shows up in the little things like the office WiFi going out because they thought the bill was too much and wanted to renegotiate with the router company.
That is why the header to this review is what it is. Even the best features are always criticized for being too expensive. This is an organization that sees money-making as its only business – cybersecurity is an afterthought, orthogonal to, and at times in the way of, getting rich quick. You, your health, and your peace of mind are an unfortunate inconvenience to the mad delusions of the oleaginous cult leader and his transparently impolite prodigé. Before you join, ask yourself – how much is it worth selling your soul?