Jul 30, 2022
Anonymous employee
PortSwigger Response
3yThank you for your review. We are always keen to receive feedback, even when it is difficult to hear. I’d like to respond to some of your comments.
It is true that we have exceptional people and we give due praise for their amazing work. Celebrating our success is actually something we have had to work at. Because we set such a high bar for ourselves, it is all too easy to view brilliant performance as “expected” and not give colleagues enough praise. Further, many (maybe most) of our people are in the “anxious over-achiever” mould, and are prone to doubting their own abilities. I am shocked that you have heard colleagues talking about being superior to others. In my experience it is rare to hear anyone blowing their own trumpet, let alone claiming superiority over others. There are of course many other incredible people working elsewhere. We’d love to hire more of them.
Regarding my own emotional intelligence, like many people I have my imperfections. I’ve been on quite a personal journey, from being a solo hacker-developer to leading a company of 100+ people where EQ is highly valued. I still have much to learn, not least from many of my amazing colleagues. The feedback I frequently receive from them is a great help. For the occasions when I have been emotionally tone-deaf in my dealings with you, I can only apologise, and humbly request that you grant me the same freedom to fail that we aspire to give to all our Swiggers.
Apologies that you have been given an inaccurate picture of our structure at PortSwigger. We actually don’t claim to have a flat structure. We have teams with team leaders, organised into tribes led by tribal elders, and I lead the whole business. What we do say is that we minimise hierarchy, and this means that we don’t really care about job titles, we don’t impose swimlanes on people based on their level of experience, we view leadership as being servant-based (enabling others to succeed) as well as being often shared and contextual, and we make decisions in a collaborative way. But with 100+ people, we of course can’t be a pure democracy or give everyone complete autonomy. That would be a recipe for anarchy and failure.
I'm sorry that you are not finding your work at PortSwigger fun. The idea that fun is an important factor at work is indeed a cornerstone of our culture. It plays out in various ways: we work on fun and interesting challenges; we look for ways of working that are enjoyable; we are surrounded by fun people who are nice to each other; we have fun at social events and all-hands meetings alongside getting the job done. Having fun at work isn’t about everyone getting to decide what work they take on. If that happened, we would quickly become misaligned, pulling in different directions, and ultimately fail as a business. That wouldn't be fun.
Dafydd Stuttard