Mar 1, 2018 - Software Engineerin San Francisco, CA
Recommend
CEO Approval
Business Outlook
Pros
New office with lots of light. Free lunch and dinner, and a well stocked kitchen. Sit-stand desks and Herman Miller Aeron chairs.
Cons
Engineering is all about speed. No regard to quality whatsoever. Management pushes too aggressively for features, putting developers under excessive pressure. No knowledge sharing forums or tutorials or anything that helps engineers with professional development.
21 people found this review helpful
Blend Response
Head of Engineering
Thank you for your feedback regarding Blend. I’d like to address the comments regarding quality and speed, as these have been growing focus areas for engineering this year.
We believe quality doesn’t come at the price of speed. Engineering teams need to have strong guardrails (such as a strong test suite) and development practices to achieve both. Our engineering principles call for both. Admittedly, as the team scales in size, these principles are becoming harder to maintain without explicitly scheduling work to improve them. As a company, we are now doing just that!
Over the past six months, we have implemented changes to our product development organization to ensure our quality bar is high as we iterate on features. At the highest level we have prioritized hardening our platform, improving our ability to test and monitor our systems, and developing tools to enable engineers to iterate more rapidly. In fact, quality of service and iteration speed are now company-level OKRs.
We are also changing how we work:
1. A feature is not considered done until all tests are written in a repeatable fashion.
2. We have moved from manual regression testing to a fully automated test suite.
3. Product and engineering leads are now jointly accountable for the overall quality of development, allowing healthy discussions during sprint planning between new feature work and technology improvements.
4. Development of engineering tools focused on improving quality and iteration speed is explicitly advocated for and resourced during product planning, including metrics to show how the tools increase overall productivity.
5. We have identified areas that cannot fail in the product and are iterating and strengthening how they are tested.
6. Quality engineers are now embedded in product development groups as masters of an area of the business.
Our customers demand quality, and we will continue to iterate and improve how we operate to maintain it. At Blend, we believe that we can have both speed and quality by demanding excellence of ourselves and how we work. Is there room for improvement? Definitely. As a team we should always be improving how we do things -- it’s one of our principles.
--Chris Dunn, Head of Engineering
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Engineering work at Blend Labs
Mar 1, 2018 - Software Engineer in San Francisco, CAPros
New office with lots of light. Free lunch and dinner, and a well stocked kitchen. Sit-stand desks and Herman Miller Aeron chairs.
Cons
Engineering is all about speed. No regard to quality whatsoever. Management pushes too aggressively for features, putting developers under excessive pressure. No knowledge sharing forums or tutorials or anything that helps engineers with professional development.
Blend Response
Head of Engineering
Thank you for your feedback regarding Blend. I’d like to address the comments regarding quality and speed, as these have been growing focus areas for engineering this year. We believe quality doesn’t come at the price of speed. Engineering teams need to have strong guardrails (such as a strong test suite) and development practices to achieve both. Our engineering principles call for both. Admittedly, as the team scales in size, these principles are becoming harder to maintain without explicitly scheduling work to improve them. As a company, we are now doing just that! Over the past six months, we have implemented changes to our product development organization to ensure our quality bar is high as we iterate on features. At the highest level we have prioritized hardening our platform, improving our ability to test and monitor our systems, and developing tools to enable engineers to iterate more rapidly. In fact, quality of service and iteration speed are now company-level OKRs. We are also changing how we work: 1. A feature is not considered done until all tests are written in a repeatable fashion. 2. We have moved from manual regression testing to a fully automated test suite. 3. Product and engineering leads are now jointly accountable for the overall quality of development, allowing healthy discussions during sprint planning between new feature work and technology improvements. 4. Development of engineering tools focused on improving quality and iteration speed is explicitly advocated for and resourced during product planning, including metrics to show how the tools increase overall productivity. 5. We have identified areas that cannot fail in the product and are iterating and strengthening how they are tested. 6. Quality engineers are now embedded in product development groups as masters of an area of the business. Our customers demand quality, and we will continue to iterate and improve how we operate to maintain it. At Blend, we believe that we can have both speed and quality by demanding excellence of ourselves and how we work. Is there room for improvement? Definitely. As a team we should always be improving how we do things -- it’s one of our principles. --Chris Dunn, Head of Engineering
Other Employee Reviews
Blend was excellent for growth
Apr 19, 2022 - Solutions ArchitectPros
Great company culture, lots of smart and hard working people
Cons
The GTM side of the house is still largely figuring out everyone’s roles and responsibilities
Nice place
May 5, 2022 - Product AnalystPros
-Great people -Treat employees pretty well -Work is interesting
Cons
-Not doing so well right now -Little disorganized at times -Not very transparent
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