Docent Health Reviews

I did not enjoy my time at Docent for many reasons that I’ll begin to explain below and my hope is that someone who is considering joining knows all the facts before they jump into this company. Starting with the interview process, I noticed several immediate red flags. Throughout the interview I was asked some simple behavioral questions along with common-sense project management and engineering questions. Although this is a nice change from the common barrage of technical questions that you typically get, it did raise a flag that the engineering team was disorganized and didn’t know how to properly vet engineering candidates. Throughout the interview, I only had one technical question and for the most part, wasn’t interviewed by actual engineers. The second flag I noticed was the fact that they’d had an extraordinary high turnover rate. In the past two months, they had lost several senior engineers. This was pretty high considering that the engineering team was very small but it was only the tip of the iceberg.
 Finally, I was warned during the interview about the amount of tech debt that they accumulated. Just some background, they hired contractors to build out the first version of the project who had the technical know-how of high schoolers working on a side project. It’s a small company so I thought that was normal but once I jumped into the code base it became apparent at how much of a problem it actually was. I asked them about it and on the surface, the team seemed committed to tackling the problem, but the legacy code was deeply rooted in the product’s foundation. All of these warnings aside, I loved the mission of connecting patient experiences, and I saw an opportunity to actually make a difference in the company. It was a startup so I knew there would be some rough edges but, I completely underestimated how difficult it would actually be. In my first week, I discovered how bad the debt actually was. They had created micro-services to the point that they even lost track of what the dependencies were and why they were created in the first place. I have to be honest, I’ve never seen such poor design. Servers kept crashing without us understanding the root cause. Product prioritized sprints and brushed off real technical concerns. Coming from companies with a solid engineering foundation, it was completely unacceptable. Being on a 2 week release schedule, it took me 6 weeks to finally release production code. Coming from a background where we released code on the first day, this was a much slower pace that I was used to. Constant rollbacks made us miss release windows and wait another 2 weeks. Engineering challenges aside, it was clear we had our work cut out for us and as long as people were committed to change, I felt confident we could chip away at some bad practices in the company. Unfortunately this is where it things get ugly. I can work with people that acknowledge shortcomings and work together to solve problems. I cannot work with people who brush it off defensively. I’ve been around long enough to know that criticism shouldn't be about blame but rather solution oriented. Any mention about what we needed to improve was responded with defensiveness and in extreme cases, anger. Culturally, Docent doesn’t have an environment where people listened to criticism well and people looked after their own self interests rather than that of the companies. This wasn’t everyone there but there were enough bad eggs to leave a sour taste. This atmosphere halted any chance of progress and we ended up stuck in a company with acknowledged shortcomings and poor practices but absolutely no commitment to change. Because of that, the attrition only got worse to the point that we lost and replaced over 70% of the engineering team. My hope is that Docent turns it around and is able to scrutinize management, its organizational structure, and processes. Some make sense. Most don’t. More importantly, I’d like them to listen more and do something. Having such a hierarchical structure at a small company means a higher degree of separation with people who are actually getting things done. For a small company, they have a crazy number of managers and middle managers compared with individual contributors. Docent’s working on a real problem which is why, despite the red flags, I thought it was worth joining. But having a good mission will only get then so far. Being able to execute is another and from my time there, I’m not convinced they’ll be able to do that effectively without serious changes.