Thirdfort is, without a doubt, the most dysfunctional and toxic workplace I've ever encountered in my entire twenty-year career. While many companies have flaws you can adapt to or try to improve, Thirdfort is a complete façade—presenting itself as professional on the outside while being a chaotic, mismanaged mess behind the scenes.
From the very beginning, Thirdfort sets a pretentious tone with an absurdly bloated five-stage interview process that makes you feel like you're auditioning for a spot at a top-tier tech giant—only to end up in a second-rate operation pretending to be something it's not. Throughout the interviews, you're force-fed a laughable set of "company values" that are supposedly integral to how the business runs, but in reality, they're nothing more than corporate propaganda used to lure in unsuspecting hires.
Once inside, the illusion crumbles quickly. The company is essentially a cult of compliance, where independent thinking is suffocated and the founders' egos dictate everything. One founder, with zero technical background and a history in finance, inexplicably has complete control over the engineering department—micromanaging technical decisions he doesn’t even understand. It's an insult to any skilled engineer to be subjected to such amateur oversight.
Disagree with the top-down nonsense or offer a differing technical opinion? Don’t worry—you’ll be shown the door. That’s not a warning, it’s a pattern. Talented engineering leads have already been pushed out for daring to challenge the flawed direction dictated from above.
In my personal experience, there also appears to be an unsettling undercurrent of racial bias within the company. Employees from underrepresented backgrounds often seem to face disproportionate scrutiny and are frequently among the first to be penalised or pushed out when internal tensions arise. Whether it’s conscious or systemic, the pattern is difficult to overlook and raises serious concerns.
As for the so-called “tech stack,” there barely is one. The product is a glorified stitching service—cobbling together outputs from third-party services and repackaging them into a single document. There is nothing innovative or proprietary about what they do. Their only saving grace is operating in the legal sector, which is notoriously tech-illiterate; in any other industry, they would be obsolete overnight.
The company’s real obsession isn't with product development or user value—it’s with optics. Trustpilot reviews are treated like gold, and customers are hounded for positive feedback. Meanwhile, the core company values are empty slogans that leadership doesn’t even pretend to follow. “Operate openly,” for instance, is a joke—they routinely hide information even from internal management.
You might be wondering how such a sham of a company has glowing Glassdoor ratings and upbeat LinkedIn posts. Easy: it’s orchestrated. New hires are told to update their LinkedIn with positive messages as part of onboarding, which says everything you need to know about how seriously they take authentic representation.
In short, if you're a competent engineer with self-respect and a desire to work in a technically sound, transparent, and values-driven environment—run far, far away from Thirdfort. This is not a company; it’s a polished façade masking a deeply broken, autocratic, and amateur operation.
