It has taken me a while to write this review as I still feel a little scarred about my experience at CircleCI.
Like all organisations, a lot depends on your direct manager. Mine was very poor and clearly out of her depth. In general, I found this to be a common theme within engineering leadership. There was a lot of talk that contradicted action and this resulted in some fairly significant trust issues.
I didn’t find the company vision to be clear or well thought through. Everything felt like winging it. And, interestingly, for a company that talks so much internally about diversity and inclusion, the reality felt quite the opposite. Again, this is largely down to having the wrong senior leaders in place. If you want to scale successfully, you’ve got to have the right people at the top. CircleCI doesn’t. The impact of this is constant turnover.
The role I ended up doing was also very different from the one I signed up to and led to a significant lifestyle change that I would never have signed up for had I known what the role entailed.
The company also brands itself as a remote first organisation. I personally found it to be incredibly SF focused. If you live anywhere else in the world, get read to feel like a second class citizen.
If you’re interested in working at a startup, I highly recommend trying a different one.