Specific to RMS
One of the most unprofessional and unethical environments I have ever had the privilege of working in. RMS is ran like a good ol’ boy system and retribution is absolutely a thing.
Not only is there an abundance of unethical behavior, but I have also witnessed firsthand where members of leadership use their position to threaten to “manage people out” for discussing or reporting the unethical behavior.
Substance over flash is no longer a thing - flash without substance is rewarded and Rackspace marketing and empty blog posts filled with buzz words reflect this. RMS or whatever it is being called now is a prime example of this - cutting edge SIEM, 0-day stopping proactive technology, machine learning, threat intelligence, human factor! Much wow! Unfortunately a lot of this is marketing speak and over selling on capabilities that they do not actually have. It’s expected that the analysts will cover up these short comings as they talk to customers, forcing them to lie their way out of incidents and mislead customers.
RMS leadership and product make terrible decisions, it's more like they buy shiny things and products from companies their friends work at rather than seeing what best applies to Rackspace customers and their environments. An example of the decision making - IDS IP blocks, buy an IDS without RMS you get some auto blocking capabilities. RMS leadership decided it was best to disable that since they do zero base lining and just let everything hit the environment unless it's crazy aggressive or it was already successful. They sell it as analysts are manually reviewing these alerts in “near real time”, but in reality by the time a manual block could be added, the attack is usually over so no block is ever put in place unless it was successful. It's all reactive, not proactive.
The internal tools for day to day operations were built out of necessity by analysts. They are not production ready or running on production quality hardware and it felt like the CSOC was being held together with duct tape and bubble gum. Everything could fail at any time. This has also allowed the people who “built” the CSOC to never resolve any of the short comings or even acknowledge them. When analysts would bring up all of this in feedback sessions, management would always just say “We didn’t know, mate” – again and again for the 3 yrs I was present. There is no responsibility or ownership amongst them what so ever, all while they continue to get promoted.
Top talent has been bailing in the last 2 years and it gets worse every day. Pay has been going down, promotions are far and few between anymore unless you are a manager or higher. The level of talent coming in has been getting lower and lower. ALL of the top analyst in the CSOC have left at this point. Pretty much all that is left is a bunch of L1s and a few guys who are more worried about controlling things like scheduling and random policies than actual security or incidents.
Unfortunately at this point, it seems as though RMS is being run by a few guys with military backgrounds and they are trying to run it just like the military. This mentality really brought down the moral and new people with military backgrounds were often brought on at much higher levels than they should have been (either being friends already or respect/rank), leading to a lot of dead weight in the senior spots which further brought down the moral. They are down to minimal manning now and it’s pretty clear that leadership is not really concerned with having enough staffing to ensure customer environments are monitored properly. It’s all about the money.
Rackspace in general
It almost seems like there are more managers of fanatical support than actual front line rackers. Meanwhile most teams seem to manage themselves without the manager. The managers that are hired also generally don't have backgrounds in the areas they work either and are often friends of other management. When issues arise, they are often buried in these circles of friends with no resolution.
Customer churn is crazy high, more and more are figuring out that Rackspace is generally more expensive and the premium they are paying for support is not actually getting them premium support.
You often find you support something new via the announcement the public sees and have nothing in place to actually support those things. Google cloud is probably the most recent example.
Lastly, the organic culture that was Rackspace is long gone. The real drivers of that culture, the people who are actually supporting customers with technical issues, are often buried in work getting yelled at by customers to do unsupported work that they were oversold on and that racker won’t even get to go “drink the beer at the awesome parties” that Rackspace publishes on their blog or youtube. For the real rackers, it gets pretty miserable at times and the feeling of hopelessness just grows as the work increases and teams/talent continue to dwindle all while marketing just keeps ramming fanatical support down your throat.
