Great people everywhere; some areas do require tweaks
Pros
Great culture. You may sometimes have differing views from the views from Matthew. Still, the fact that he keeps a open communications channel with everyone in the company is a statement of how he and his closer team, including Michelle as a co-founder, believe in what they are doing. And it shows because people do work to make the internet a better place. People around are great to work with, which shows how well the recruiting process is doing. Teams are globally distributed, but the work pace is well adjusted to it, and it does feel that everyone contributes asynchronously and very effectively. The compensation is not the greatest out there, but it's at least on the median for the market. I've felt throughout the year I was there that the work-life balance was always good, although because of my role, there were times when I'd have to adjust my schedule to do some things at unconventional hours. Never felt that I had to do extra hours, though. The growth is good, if not very good. The products are excellent, and the Engineering team is the first to push further on innovation. It was a pleasure to work with those folks.
Cons
Growth in particular areas more prone to change (innovation) is causing some expected pivoting, but it's not always easy to digest. In my specific case, I went through 3 different managers in less than seven months. While they were all part of a common structure, it did cause me to feel a disconnection from that "common goal" thing, and inevitably this pace of change ends up causing small communication silos. Due to the company being based in the US, the EU people did feel like we were not part of the org/re-org decisions other than being informed. Motivation is hard to keep in these situations. There is also quite a gap in process speed between the more established/graduated departments and product areas and the innovation area, where new products get incubated. That clash between doing things at lightning speed and then facing the "big machine" slower processes could also be improved. Those were minor things compared to how good it felt to work at Cloudflare and prevented me from giving a total 5* rating.
