Pros
- Career growth: Managers actually care, encourage, assist, and find opportunities for employees to grow within their roles (or even change roles entirely).
- Fantastic leadership: They are competent, intelligent, humble, and kind. They're thoughtful about the impact of their actions, actually listen to and actively encourage employee feedback, own and correct any mistakes, and repeatedly demonstrate that they care about the well-being of each employee (this has become particularly apparent during the pandemic). They've also demonstrated a clear commitment to ensuring the product is not used to spread hatred of any kind, by building (and continuing to grow) a strong Trust and Safety team.
- Coworkers skilled in many disciplines: Discord has a high hiring bar, and you'll learn a ton from your talented team-members. In addition to screening for strong role-related skills, the interview process screens for strong "soft skills." There's a strong culture of collaboration, transparency, and asking questions.
- Culture of transparency: From the leadership to the employees, everyone is encouraged to speak up about anything at any time (with option for maintaining anonymity). Discord acknowledges that it's okay to make mistakes and to be "wrong" about something.
- Great benefits: Discord is very thoughtful in their benefits offering, currently including fully-covered vision/dental/health insurance, mental and physical health funds, transgender medical funds, remote-work funds, generous PTO and sick-leave policy, and others I am forgetting.
- Modern tech stack: A good chunk of the tech stack is beautiful and modern, and the parts that are less lovable are being overhauled one-by-one.
- Fun problems: The work we're doing is fun, challenging, and rewarding (for the most part).
Cons
- Employee ambition: Some senior employees are ambitious and never stop working. Management has repeatedly encouraged us not to follow these examples, to take time off and not overwork ourselves, but some people enjoy it, and that can lead other employees to assume they need to do the same to succeed.
