Upwind Reviews

Note: Positive reviews appear to have increased significantly since the direct pressure started for them from the CEO. Some of the most dishonest and unethical practices I’ve seen in the cybersecurity industry. This includes employees being regularly lied to and misled by management, demos being faked to close deals with prospects, major gaps in coverage being swept under the rug and hidden from customers. The decision making of the executive team has grown more confusing and erratic as time has gone on. The mood in the office has deteriorated badly, and efforts to improve it have been lacklustre. Engineers have been fired at the whim of the executive team, with numerous cases of employees being completely blindsided with no warning before being let go. The complete lack of feedback loops is a major contribution to this, but suggestions for improvement in this area have been ignored. Internal demos consistently devolve into senior management arguing about what the requirements should be, despite projects having been designed and worked on by engineers to the original description. When the demo then doesn’t match the newly invented requirements this is taken out on the engineers. The expectations from the top are to ship features as fast as possible, but also for these features to be “industry leading”, and that everything should work “flawlessly.” This has inevitably led to an insurmountable level of tech debt, an incredibly fragile product, and an excessive among of defects. There is little to no interest in resolving this, and a complete lack of understanding of how this slows down the development process of new features and will continue to compound. Customer experience and security are not a top priority despite the lip service they are paid. Whether the products can actually provide customers real value is less of a concern than appearing like they can. The leadership is completely unprepared for the scaling problems they’re starting to face as they try to grow beyond a small scale startup. The lack of people management experience and organisational strategy is shocking.

A word of warning: there is currently an active internal push to get employees to leave positive reviews. I would encourage you to scroll back a little further in recent views, and then draw your own conclusions about what that says. Unfortunately anyone with good intentions will be hamstrung by an incompetent C-suite who like to use the "startup culture" cop-out to explain why they cannot create a coherent product roadmap. A roadmap driven by reactionary engineering due to a lack of market understanding, 'follow the leader' where the leader is every competitor all at once. Some of the previous reviews about C-Suite hunger games ring very true. Lack of process is actively celebrated here, dressed up as a virtue. There is a peculiar cultural pride in "not being like those other engineers who sit in meetings all day" - as though process itself is the enemy. What gets lost in that framing is that what's happening here barely qualifies as engineering in any meaningful sense. Commit counts and lines of code are treated as proxies for value, which conveniently obscures the fact that the output is a growing pile of hacked-together features that solve problems poorly, incompletely, or not at all. Velocity is the metric. Quality is someone else's problem, usually the next engineer unfortunate enough to touch the code. Do not be persuaded by some of the strange reviews on here claiming that the work is 'interesting' because it is not what is being claimed and people seem to either have rose tinted glasses on or have never worked on anything interesting before. The technical reality is that ~80% of the work is CRUD development on top of foundations that experienced engineers find genuinely embarrassing. This industry has seen years of learning how to build scalable SaaS apps and yet, due to inexperienced founding engineers who made some awful architectural decisions, you will enjoy building CRUD apps on questionable, frustrating and poorly tested foundations. Poorly tested, heavily hacked, and resistant to improvement, it is the gift that keeps on giving. The remaining work splits between firefighting half-baked features and navigating a codebase that reads like a cautionary tale. Some parts of the codebase are so littered with irrational logic and feature flags that they will likely evade the comprehension of ever improving LLM models for at least the next decade, so you may find some job security here. The development philosophy, if it can be called that, is: ship the easy 70% at speed, pretend the other 30% doesn't exist, and panic when customers find it. Testing is a luxury. PoCs become permanent. The C-Suite's response to quality concerns is to ask when the next feature will be ready. You get to enjoy panic driven development by day, and panic driven fire-fighting by night. You won't be alone though, C-Suite members will be sure to keep their watchful eye on you, often pinging for updates and offering solutions to problems they don't fully understand. Sadly, the only thing most of the C-Suite remain consistent in, is their insistence on micromanaging and pushing their incompetence into every crevice of the product. You will not be listened to here, it is your job to listen, not the other way around. There is culture at Upwind, it is a culture of fear and panic. On culture from the top: the CEO's response to news that Israel-based staff were sheltering from attacks was to remind everyone to maintain productivity. To paraphrase his words: "Be strong, stay safe. Let's keep our productivity at the highest level, that's the only way to win." Make of that what you will.