Pros
Imprivata is a solid, profitable company. Its private equity owners have a lot of faith in its products and leadership. The people are generally good to work with. The DevOps Director Fergal Sweeney is especially an excellent boss and leader. Before I left, IT was forced to support Ubuntu and MacOS as first-class citizens. The developers genuinely want to work with you, and have a lot of experience. They know their craft and want to excel at it. QE is nice to work with as well, knowledgeable, consistent and communicative. The DevOps team members that were there with me are exceptional performers and know how to handle both technical and non-technical problems.
Cons
Things move slowly at Imprivata compared to their size and maturity. They should be more nimble than they are, and are weighed down by a long series of acquisitions that took a very long time to properly integrate into the engineering organization. The IT department refuses to automate anything, or allow the VPN to auto scale. IT and Security view the cloud and open source software with extreme skepticism and will fight tooth and nail with engineering to buy some “enterprise” solution that’s just unpatched open source tools in a trench coat and claim its “more secure as closed-source”. Speaking of IT, the default laptop at Imprivata is a Lenovo running Windows. They begrudgingly purchase anything else and hate Apple products with a burning passion. They were forced into supporting Ubuntu and MacOS and weren’t happy about it. The Architects have ego-driven, drawn-out battles about every possible design decision, and make all of engineering wait on their fragile personalities before progress can be made. As of 2023, the product department was kind of a mess, but did have a plan to get back on track.
