Pros
-Strong commitment to the education mission, from the founders down to individual employees. Everyone knows why they’re here, and many people have in-class teaching experience. -Extremely thoughtful approach to culture that focuses on both maintaining what we have and ensuring that we don’t just hire people in the same mold. -Focus on learning new things, which is apparent everywhere from company benefits (free Amazon credits for learning materials) to events (biweekly “tech” talks on individual employees’ interests like exoplanets, mashup DJing, and history) -Feels like working around your friends - everyone is cool and interesting in addition to being capable, and people voluntarily hang out after work all the time. -Blame-free culture, both within and outside engineering; I’ve been really impressed with the way we’ve dealt with outages and failures. -Real-time rapid growth - in the 10 months that I’ve been here, we’ve almost doubled in school count and the number of students on the platform (now at 30K schools and 13M students).
Cons
-We’re growing pretty rapidly, and we’re about to outgrow our office. We have plans to move within the city in the near term but in the interim it's going to be pretty cramped and noisy. We’re exploring creative interim solutions, though (WeWork spaces, renting an offsite house, etc.).