Rapid7 FAQ

Pros

They have a coffee bar and call us "moose"

Cons

This was one of the most disappointing stops in my 20+ year career. Hired as an Enterprise A/E--quickly discovered this is a tactical sales company--cannot understand long sales cycles and have an immature and inexperienced sales team. Worse--sales leadership doesn't reward strategic thinking or have the patience for a sales cycle longer than a quarter or two.

Advice to Management

Rethink your strategy for accounts with over $1 Billion in revenue

Pros

- Lots of interesting problems to solve. - Very smart engineering teams, with relatively few rotten apples making it through the hiring process. - Time and effort being allocated to upgrade and/or replace legacy components, slowly but steadily. This didn't use to be the case, but the results of this work are paying off and making for a much more pleasant developer experience. - Great degree of autonomy. Whether you just want to take on tickets and finish them off and be left alone outside working hours, or you really want to take ownership of something from the design stage all the way through to completion, there is plenty of opportunity for both depending on what you are looking for here. - Long-time employees in the Dublin office are getting a lot better at acknowledging that certain parts of the system are just not good and need to be fixed/replaced, whereas a few years ago there was more of a "don't insult my baby!" mentality. - Engineers and teams as a whole get a lot of flexibility to work whatever way suits them best, so long as they manage to meet their goals. If there is a feeling that a particular way of working within the team that doesn't work very well, a lot of the time all that is needed is a verbal agreement among the members of the team in order to get things changed. - In general engineers are given the flexibility to move around teams and projects as they see fit. - There is a friendly, welcoming and informal culture in the office where someone is always willing to help you out or explain something to you. The office is also very diverse yet there are relatively few culture clashes. - Very good benefits package

Cons

- Career progression happens either smoothly or gets turned into a long drawn-out bureaucratic process, depending on whether specific managers like you personally, seemingly regardless of ability. Being moved around teams/managers also seems to significantly hinder this process. - Talk about your salary among your colleagues. Some people are getting severely screwed over, and I guarantee you the management cannot be trusted when it comes to this. The only ones that stand to gain from the taboo are managers. - Forever playing catch-up with end-of-life runtime and framework versions. You'd think as a security company they'd be more concerned about this. Aside from the security side of things, it's also just very much not enjoyable to have to work on services that rely on frameworks for which support ended and documentation went offline over 5 years ago. - The clique. Everyone who has worked here for any reasonable length of time will have at least a rough idea of who or what I'm talking about here. - There is a huge degree of "not invented here" syndrome within the company as a whole. Internal competition can be good, but in reality what this actually seems to result in most of the time is hostility and grudges between offices. Within the office itself this has also resulted in a lot of hand-rolled solutions and wrappers around other solutions to problems that the industry has already solved.

Advice to Management

The head of HR has often been heard saying "People don't quit jobs, they quit their managers." and she's right. The Dublin office's has grown a lot over the time I have been at Rapid7, and the office has faced significant challenges at various stages throughout its growth. It is long overdue for the Dublin office to get some HR on-site. People are simply not inclined to contact some HR person over in a different office who they more than likely have never met before, when issues arise.

Pros

Salary is decent for Boston but low by tech standards Great benefits if covering for family

Cons

Rapid7 was pretty great in the past when it was smaller but has been struggling to get the right org. structure. Multiple teams are performing similar functions and are stepping on each other’s toes. The employees per million of revenue is very high compared to mature companies Siloed thinking. Too much politics and too top heavy. Flagship products have been lagging on the engineering end but are expected to still show strong sales.

Advice to Management

Take a look at the org structure and combine/centralize teams that do the same work. Reduce the number of VPs and SVPs! Don’t blame sales for product deficiencies.

Pros

There are many smart, driven people at the company who I hope will get the recognition they deserve one day. Benefits and corporate learning programs are solid. Good work life balance.

Cons

Boys' Club culture runs rampant at Rapid7, especially in the GTM functions of the organization. Translates to inequity in pay and representation for women and POC despite well-intentioned corporate diversity and inclusion initiatives. Promotions are awarded based on internal politics and being loud "ideas people" vs. actual merit & execution. Very unclear milestones/development plans for growing your career internally.

Advice to Management

Attempts to relay feedback or concerns to People Strategy are almost always dead ends. If people feel that they are being listened to and see change, they'll be more willing to stick around.

Pros

Great benefits, beautiful office, most people are great

Cons

Pay is substandard. Management and culture will emphasize team/family environment, but it’s a popularity contest of who caters to manger’s fragile egos. “Be yourself and present ideas” as long as they don’t go against established systems and the managers can pawn the ideas off as their own. Internal mobility and growth is solely dependent on “building your brand”. In other words, how in-your-face you can be in front of everyone and how much you continue to pump your managers ego.

Advice to Management

Stop lying to employees and set proper expectations. Don’t tell someone growth and mobility is possible if you hit your numbers if it’s actually based on intangible factors like attending every social outing and acting like your manager is the coolest manager out there.