Not the norm industry experience, is it a good thing?
Pros
Crowdstrike bar-none is the leader in EDR and just making sure computer abnormalities (from malware, hackers, etc) are visible and detectable and not hidden from a user. The company acts like they want to win the market and are growing like crazy to get there. Their cloud solution is a cash cow, with numerous ways to make money. The engineers are disciplined and have a pretty good programming process (this should be expected in the security space but sadly it may not and I've been at security companies that cut corners in the name of deadlines). They are pretty well organized being a geographically dispersed company. Finally all new employees take a business course of Crowdstrike's products which the lectures are typically done by VPs and high engineers, and that is very super-cool, novel 'newbie training' idea- you do feel like you understand the security market more afterwords.
Cons
For starters, Crowdstrike's development environment is a hodge-podge set of home-grown development tools, debuggers, test frameworks, VMs and programming languages that frankly I'm sometimes surprised it at all even works. You think you'll be able to rely on say, PyCharm IDE debugger to help you debug a python code? Nope. You'll start questioning yourself if it's worth growing your work experience in this home-grown tool environment over say a more industry standard experience, say gaining experience writing Java code with Jetbrains IntelliJ and using JUnit to test. Many reqs at crowdstrike can say "C++ experience needed" but you may rarely do any C++ development and instead use a home grown modeling language. This all can be very frustrating as the ramp-up curve is very steep and you cannot simply do things like go on the internet and take a programming course to exelerate your ramp up- you really need work-time and not Google learn things. prey that you have a manager that really understands this and is good about ramping up people the right way which is SLOWLY. Second Im not sure where managers/leadership gets the idea that say, a Linux expert, can be successful at Windows development tasks. They may label you as a "Linux resource" but in-practice can prove otherwise. It happens more than you think. Another con is the company tends to still operate like a startup, which at a 4000+ employee post-IPO company, they need to start acting more mature about this. Let's get real- when COVID is over and people can leave their homes to go and do stuff (vacations, movies, jazz shows, etc) the company will not get as many work hours out of their employees and Crowdstrike better adjust for that and reset expectations. Don't think when you are told your bonus number in your offer letter you are going to get it. More times than not, it's actually a bit harder to achieve. I've been at companies where if you work hard and management knows you at least tried and put in the effort to make a deadline you'll get a say, quarterly bonus. Not here. There is a huge reliance on slack for communication if you are not a fan of slack. Like huge-huge, so much so people tend to forget there exists an invention called email. If there is going to be a downfall to Crowdstrike it will be due to their home-grown tool/development environment locking the wheels of productivity when all that talent that developed those things as side projects leave the company, which could be sooner than you think from their IPO success. Finally here is a trade-off con/pro: Crowdstrike pays well but are you really making more money? You will most likely work from home, and Crowdstrike will only pony up a laptop and monitor- the rest (desks, ergonomics, etc) is on your dime. I don't believe you can write off those work-related things on your tax return. And see if things like your utilities bills go up as a result from working remote. My "recommendation to a friend" is really neutral. Crowdstike is a leader in cyber-security solutions utilizing the cloud and you'll gain some great insight into modern cyber-security. But remote work isn't for everyone. And Crowdstrike needs to temper down the start-up mentality. And the home-grown tool/development situation isn't a great way to gain experience/expertise when you are looking for that next software engineering opportunity elsewhere.
