The Fish Rots From the Head - Engineering Abnormal AI Employee Review

1.0
2 Mar 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The only redeeming part of working at Abnormal used to be the people. Sadly a lot of them were laid off or “managed out” by the leadership with no particular cause or direction.

Cons

The lack of direction, basic competency, and absolute decision making chaos is one of the defining features of this company. I have absolutely no confidence in the CEO's ability to define solid direction for this company and then stick to it. This company hasn't shipped anything major in over two years. The lack of execution isn't just on the CEO. You can tell from other reviews here that engineering is being heavily micromanaged by the CTO whose planning and system design skills don't seem to go beyond “what can you hack together in a week”. As the direct result of this, the execution velocity has stalled, there are outages happening almost every single week, and every engineer who is within a vicinity of being on the pager is months into a solid burn out. Career growth: no matter how much they tell you that Abnormal Security is a “career enabler” if you're an engineer you will end up doing one of two things: 1. Hacking together some Django apps hoping you won't have to maintain them 2. Constantly fighting outages and customer escalations That's it. The reward for your hard work is nothing but more work. And good luck doing this for a few years and then trying to interview somewhere else.

avatar
Abnormal AI Response
3y
Thanks so much for leaving an honest review—we truly value your feedback. Being in a reactive state is never the ideal. The downturn in the economy has impacted many organizations, including Abnormal. As a result, we’ve made some incredibly difficult decisions in order to consolidate functions for greater efficiency and match our team structure to changing business needs. Moving forward, we are making changes to adjust to the new phase of growth and build for durability so that all employees can feel confident both in the future of Abnormal and in their future with the company. We are also working hard to create a manager enablement program that addresses these issues. We’re committed to creating an environment where our employees can thrive, and we know that can’t happen without effective, well-trained managers to guide them. We’re sorry we didn’t get it right by you.

Explore other reviews about Abnormal AI

5.0
10 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Amazing Product Strong leadership Easy to sell

Cons

Fully remote Loose on structure

3.0
31 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

While pay IS competitive there were a few employees that were well underpaid even at the level they were at. Pro's - are that they educate you to use AI, the overall people team is great.

Cons

There was a shift in leadership last Fall and there have been cultural changes and not great ones. People are promoted without having the right experience required for the job aka senior manager roles. It seems like everyone is not happy and wants to leave. It is just a matter of time until turnover happens. There has been too many promises broken, broken leadership communication which results in a lack of trust, some managers are now micromanaging and it comes across as they fear for their jobs. They want to IPO which is great but ousting the entire GTM leadership sales team and head of people around the same time raised eyebrows.

See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All