Stable Kernel Reviews

Pros

- Company leadership has strong values and clearly communicates the vision and goals of the organization. - Meaningful work with colleagues who care about doing excellent work and treating each other with kindness and respect. - Hybrid working environment. Working from home is supported and encouraged, and a great office on the Atlanta beltline is available for fully vaccinated team members to use if desired. - Employer-paid health insurance for employees. - 4 weeks of PTO - Pursuit of personal development opportunities is encouraged and enabled, including an annual stipend to pay for courses. - Opportunities for growth and advancement

Cons

Will update if any surface

Pros

Ability to build meaningful professional relationships, a land full of acknowledgement and praise, engaged and respectful clients, feelings of empowerment daily, structured management, beautiful workspace, dog-friendly office, strong communication, realistic work/life balance

Cons

No cons at the moment!

Pros

1) Every day is a great day with the SK family. I spend many late evenings going out with them and consider each and every person I work with as a personal friend. 2) When someone is not a team player, action is taken to help align them with our expectations. Generous amounts of advice is given and people take an interest in helping employees grow. 3) Culture is important. Stable Kernel takes this seriously. Diversity education, acting classes, movie nights, happy hours, healthy food in the fridge, yoga classes, wellness education all play key parts in maintaining a culture which strives above all else to show genuine interest in your growth as a person. 4) Work life balance is a real thing. I was chided for many months about taking a vacation. SK does not want to burn out software developers and they manage the stress very well. 5) Individual responsibility and personal integrity are stressed and they reward it by allowing you to lead large projects for big name clients which are exciting and rewarding. Each project brings something interesting to the table and learning and sharing how you manage it provides wonderful incentives for growth. 6) Conference budget!! You are encouraged as an employee to seek out places and events where you feel you can learn. This is not some flim-flam statement. My first year I was told I needed to go to a conference, so I went on a cruise and learned about wed development. They take professional development seriously and encourage you to find avenues to learn and network within the industry. Speaking of speaking, if you speak at a conference, it does not count as your conference, but rather just as your job. You will be encouraged to find a new level of confidence and find skills that you never knew you had.

Cons

Sometimes finding a path forward in your career is left as an exercise to the employee.

Pros

- Employee Development Program is really good - Great culture of learning and sharing - Can work from home whenever - Excellent work life balance

Cons

- Clients can be frustrating

Pros

Initially, Stable Kernel seemed like a great place that cares about their employees. Unfortunately, the bigger and greedier they got, the more these things changed. They seem to give younger, junior developers a chance too. Something that I consider a pro, given that everyone needs to start somewhere.

Cons

Stable Kernel likes to make promises in all directions from benefits to improvement in the daily work up to bonuses and reviews that will never happen. Initially all that sounds good, but with no oversight and an opaque management, they always fell short on their promises. It is no wonder that there is basically no professional project management after their initial project manager was let go early last year. Even when clients mention this fact and the company will promise to do better you might end up alone on a project for weeks to come. When projects turn out to be poisonous after months of them dragging their feet without delivering any presentable results, other parties are blamed and some managers might even go into the direct offense with the client trying to blame them. Any try from individuals to surface these issues will be directly used to tell you that you are wrong. Answers given to internal (anonymous) surveys, that could have helped to improve the situation, were instantly turned around and you've been proven wrong in a harsh and commanding manner. Even if it's factual things like certain people receiving twice the time off than everyone else. It shouldn't come as a surprise that they even pressured their employees to positively respond on a "best places to work" survey. A place to avoid at any given cost if you expected a supporting workplace.

Pros

The company has trust in developers to get things done. As a small consulting shop, each developer is essentially platform lead on a project. So even if you are right out of school you will have the opportunity to be lead on a project, to learn and make mistakes.

Cons

The company is struggling financially and culturally. In the last 5 months, 40% of the engineering team has quit. This year the company cut health insurance benefits for everyone. They also dropped from 6% 401k matching to 4%. New hires are being given used (sometimes broken) MacBooks. The company is nickel​ and dime-ing every purchase. The culture of the company has also changed. The management implemented several initiatives to promote learning, sharing and open communication. However it isn't getting through to the employees. It is very hard to learn from the experience of anyone else in the company. There is very little knowledge sharing or mentoring. Each developer is siloed on their own project. People are left to review and merge their own code. The main focus is just getting work done as quickly as possible, without regard to quality or project health. Communication with clients is also failing. Some project leads are openly hostile with their clients.... who probably won't stay clients for long. Because everyone is working on their own project, management is unaware of how each project is progressing. Some projects are moving dreadfully slow with lots of problems, while others are moving very quickly with very few problems. To management they all look the same and all receive the same (lack of) attention.