Great people, great products, bad culture - Anonymous employee Qualys Employee Review

The standard operating procedure is to launch products at the last minute, with minimal runway to give GTM teams time to prepare, even if the product is not ready or not built yet. Product specs, descriptions, even names will change at any time with little to no communication and teams must scramble to update them. The CEO likes that the company works this way and believes that doing things at the last minute ensures the best possible results, so I think there is little chance of this changing as long as he is in leadership. At times, this pressure to release The Next New Thing ahead of a board meeting, quarterly earnings report, or event veers into vaporware, as products or features are presented as finished and ready within the platform when they are 6+ months away from being available as demos, let alone available to customers. One side effect of this culture is constant fire drills for things that absolutely should not be emergencies in a functional company, which leads to very poor work-life balance if you are invested in your future in the company. I routinely got meeting requests for late evenings or even the middle of the night and the expectation is that you will work 9-5 plus hours to accommodate your coworkers in other timezones, like the sizable office in Pune. Things are even worse for Pune employees, who are routinely expected to work a full workday and support requests or meetings from stateside employees until 2 or 3 in the morning. Prioritization and workload planning is very difficult because your work can be preempted at any time. The CEO is also fond of publicly criticizing people's work, especially if it appears on social media, which leads to a culture of fear where taking risks is discouraged and every piece of writing must be reviewed by as many people as possible. It makes it very difficult to create and publish work, especially on a time crunch. There is substantial turnover on many teams and it's clear that the company culture, as well as unreasonable expectations, are responsible. Due to this turnover, there is minimal documentation, no processes, and no capacity or willingness to create them. Working at Qualys felt like every day I would come to work and there would be broken glass all over the floor. I would talk to someone and say "there is broken glass everywhere. This is a horrible work environment. We need to clean up this broken glass." and they would say "you're right. Having all this broken glass everywhere is awful and if you ever want to vent about having to work in an environment covered in broken glass, I'm here to listen. But it's just the Qualys culture to work surrounded by broken glass." And I would get a broom and dustpan and clean up what I could and every morning there would be more glass.