myNetWatchman reviews

The management will tell you about how they are the most together, close-knit, family-like work atmosphere you have ever worked in, in your life, until you need to go to the doctor for something a couple times and then it becomes a problem. A "tone down the appointments" kind of problem. Then they will force you to use your PTO. Maybe this isn't something that's an issue, but I've never had an employer force me to take PTO for doctors appointments. Do you have kids? Are they sick? You will use your PTO, working from home is only allowed in the company for certain people. Your work? It seems to be secondary here. Don't be surprised if a supervisor hauls you outside to talk to you on a bi-weekly basis to talk to you about everything but your work. The most important things are coming in and becoming friends with your co-workers. You might get written up if you look at your cell phone during group lunch, always have your eyes on the bosses and make sure to talk. Otherwise, you're probably going to get a talking to for not talking enough. This may not bother you, and that's fine, people have different personalities, which I'm not sure if this company understands. Just make sure you talk a lot, seriously, the talking is more important than anything here, otherwise, you may get fired. Also understand that, while you only are asked to work 40 hours from the company office itself, the work never actually stops here. Everyone is on-call, all the time. Work first. Did something break? Is it your fault? Is it something that you can fix directly yourself? No? Cool, you need to wake up and call someone to let them know of the problem because....well....no one is sure why this is how it works because the management all have the same alert system you do so they could very easily skip a step and be notified of these failures on their own but choose not to. This is essentially their version of hazing I guess. The new guy needs to wake up and call management, just know of this ahead of time. While the other employees are nice people, they eat, breath, and sleep this job. You will wake up to many a group chats regardless of the day or time. Again, this may not bother you, it doesn't bother a lot of people and that's fine, but there are also a growing number of people who get bothered by this kind of seemingly non-stop work environment and you should know that's what the environment is like. Which is odd, that they could ask you at any moment to hop on your work laptop to take care of something from home but not allow you to actually work from home at the same time. Did I mention to talk a lot? The company is so infatuated with needing to talk to each other that you may be asked to read e-mails to people. I wish I was joking, but that became a duty, to read the e-mails that everyone in the company got to them. Management treats everyone differently. There are 2 other reviews for this company on GlassDoor and they mention something similar, those reviews are more or less right on the money.

There is an old saying in technology that if you start working at a place and they talk bad about all the former technical employees and their work, then it is a sign that they will do the same about you when operational management is the real problem. I got worried in my first few weeks at myNetWatchman because of that. Because of how bad some of the things I found were, I thought maybe they just had a run of bad employees. However it became clear that the reason things were done poorly was clearly a problem with management rushing everything you work on because of some new emergency. Everything that needs to happen is an emergency. Not just system failures that require emergency work, but often new intelligence or simply new ideas that come up are "your new number one objective." This means many tasks go 1/2 or 3/4 completed because operational management is constantly shifting direction. The operational management likes to pride themselves on being "hands on" with the technology, but lack the basic technical training required to troubleshoot even the simplest of problems. This often caused problems including delaying planned vacation and left technical debt that is almost impossible to solve. More importantly, these, and many, many other instances of operational security failures make this a dangerous workplace. Private intelligence agencies generally operate on the border of the law. Often they have special arrangements with law enforcement. However, when your adversaries are making ~6 billion in USD per year, and you prevent a huge portion of income for them, you become a serious target by people with the financial means to do real harm. Many of the groups responsible for credit card fraud are classified as terrorist organizations by the US government. This risk should bring some sense of duty and vigilance, but in my experience it was repeatedly shirked and any attempts to change policies to help solve the issue were disregarded. Any attempts to start planning and tracking work so that these problems can be more apparent are stopped. A simple scrum board with post it notes was abandoned in favor of having no process at all. The company is trying to foster a hacker culture including alcohol in the workplace, everyone is always on call, somewhat politically incorrect conversations and tolerance of verbal abuse and actions that are grounds for summary dismissal by any reasonable HR department. I witnessed several such actions including verbal and threats of physical abuse and an employee following another employee home from work after threatening them in the office with several witnesses. This led to a key employee leaving the company and the bad actor was given a warning. More importantly, I often witnessed operational management directly lie to the owners, and employees. In all three cases of employees that left, the company did not honor their employment agreements. Anyone who informed management that they plan to leave the company is said to have "lost their loyalty" and summarily dismissed. This isn't very uncommon in intelligence organizations, but that is why they offer and require 30 days paid notice. They did not honor that for the employees that saw leave or myself when I left.