Flexible hours and great team members
Pros
- Management allows a lot of flexibility in work hours (provided the work gets done and you average 40 hrs a week) to support work-life balance. - There's a strong focus on helping employees learn and grow. -Unlimited PTO (though suggested to stay around 3-4 weeks per year, and you cannot take more than 2 weeks in a row unless for special circumstances) - HR and the executives listen to and apply employee feedback, at least more than other companies I've worked at. - CEO and execs gave a promise to stay fully remote forever. - Our projects are typically interesting and fun. We're a company that is constantly looking for new ways to innovate technically. - The engineers have some amount of power to help influence what product initiatives we work on. About 15% of the time, product initiatives came from the mind of an engineer. - The engineering teams take pride in their work and their impact on the direction of the company - Our culture is helpful and not competitive - We are a fast-moving team in that we are constantly building new things and are not short on work. But not in the toxic "fast-paced" way where you're encouraged to go into burnout just to achieve your goals. - Our product team works really hard and is great at advocating for the engineers. - My coworkers are wonderful. They're all hard workers you can rely on who are kind, funny, and friendly. They're what really tip the edge for me for rating this company and job at 5 stars.
Cons
- Pay may be less than industry average for some, but I feel that's made up for by being fully remote. - Our hours are tracked using ActivTrak. Managers are trained not to micromanage with this. We also are only evaluated on our rolling 4-week weekly average for productive hours, so it's not a per-day hour requirement. There are many older negative reviews due to ActivTrak's initial implementation, and there definitely was some chaos when it was first implemented. It was not implemented in a way that allowed for flexibility of hours, and the communication around it was not great. But, the execs have listened to feedback and changed how we treat the data from it, and I now don't find it to be on the forefront of my mind as much as at the beginning. Plus, communication from the execs has improved immensely after that period of time. However, I'd still list ActivTrak as a con, as I do still spend more energy than I'd like on thinking about the quantity of my focus time vs the quality of my focus time. - Our industry has evolved a lot recently, which did cause a layoff about a year ago. - We have a lot more performance-based terminations than I've experienced at any other company. So it does lead to some general insecurity from the employees that they may be fired at any moment. - There is just a bit too much AI-hype (treating AI as all-powerful and all-knowing). It doesn't personally bother me too much, but I know some people would like to know that about an employer. - There is not much racial or gender diversity in our engineering department, but being in the minority, I do feel it has been completely inclusive. I haven't felt unequal treatment.
