Opower Employee Review

Current Employee – been working at Opower

Pros – OPOWER is executing very well on a tremendous opportunity to make a big difference in how we think about energy conservation in this country. Everyone is tightly focused on the goal of helping consumers save energy, from the sales and product teams, through the engineering organization and down through the operations group. Communication between the teams is very open and transparent, and everyone is remarkably open to ideas on how to do *anything* better. There's no cross-disciplinary defensiveness, and everyone I've worked with so far is remarkably competent at what they do. Everyone so far has also been remarkably generous with their time. Technical and product documentation on the wiki is very complete for an organization this size, and the new-hire process (getting userids/laptop/building keys/etc) was surprisingly smooth, also for an organization this size. There are some bumps needing to be managed around the torrid pace of growth, but that's a high-class kind of problem to have. The office environment is very social and engaged, but people are respectful if you've got a deadline and need to focus. Plenty of places to hunker down in a quiet corner if you need to. The product development team is very forward thinking in two ways: one, test engineering requires software engineers who are interested in testing, instead of just looking for button pushers; two, the development engineers are incredibly deeply invested in unit and integration testing and in supporting the test engineers on system level and acceptance testing.

Cons – The San Francisco office (new engineering practice being built) is a little isolated from the DC office (headquarters), but that should be mitigated as we gain critical mass. Likewise, bi-coastal commuting during the ramp up phase is a bit of a burden on work/life balance, but everyone on the team understands it and is accommodating. Likewise, that will be less of an issue as critical mass builds in SF.

Advice to Senior Management – Continue to be as open and transparent with the team about what's going on and where we're going. Try as hard as you can to make that openness scale as the team grows. Continue to keep the focus on delivering the most important things that our customers need so they keep paying us, but balance that with the engineering realities and the development, testing and operational levels. Continue to promote even more the concept that infrastructure, scaling and agility are first-class priorities within product and engineering and ops.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend