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Faithlife reviews

A Decent Place To Work If You Fit (Which You Can't Know In Advance) - Software Developer Faithlife Employee Review

2.0
May 29, 2015
Software developer
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

General - Ping pong, game night, free soda & coffee, occasional free food, company picnic & Christmas party, borrow sporting equipment. Note: these can't by themselves make a bad job good, just enhance an already good one. - Free to make statements of faith without fear of reprisal. - Very few rules, if you're the type that does well with ambiguity and dislikes certain recipes for success. - You get to read the CEO's book, "Fire Someone Today" for free. Plus hundreds of other books on self-improvement, sales, software development, and the so on. Exempt Positions - Super flexible - manage your own time. - Very few rules. Software Development - Work at a desk or at a couch or in a different room every day. - Varying freedom to work at home, depending on the situation--strong culture of teleconferencing. - Opportunity perhaps yearly for a week-long retreat to a vacation home in Arizona.

Cons

General - Besides the freedom to express faith and a perhaps higher percentage of Christian coworkers than elsewhere (especially in content departments), being a "Christian company" seems like a distinction without a difference. Clearly, those working for this company are at least not hostile to doing work to further study of the bible. But in the sales department, you're almost bound to be underpaid and mistreated, and in software development you'd best enjoy working in a silo. - The lack of rules (varying between departments) leaves managerial decisions up to individual preference--so there is no guaranteed objective basis for handling any particular situation. If you don't handle ambiguity well, this may not be the place for you. - The "we're so awesome doing important stuff unlike all those other places" sales pitch to attract talent also speaks of a culture problem at the same time. Beware. - The software development and sales departments are deeply divided over many issues, and due to the CEO and his brother individually heading these, respectively, and both being extremely strong personalities, the divide is bound to never be resolved. Expect ongoing frustration, unpleasant politics, stress, and annoyance around this fundamental company problem. Software Development - Receive inadequate frequency and quantity of feedback. - Huge focus on "the right way" to build software, as determined by the extensive coding guidelines and the personal opinions of the people who happen to review your particular code check-in. If your background and tendencies dovetail well with those, great, but if they don't--expect friction. And rewrites. And again. - Having a completely unclear management hierarchy, you may not know who is actually making decisions about you or if they actually have the information you think they, whoever they are, should have. If you're suffering from an illness that doesn't keep you home but affects your work performance, who do you tell? Who actually cares? - Expect to overhear trash talking about how other developers (by name), or entire other departments, are not as competent or smart or "with it" or have the emotional/reasoning capacity of children. - You will almost certainly not be interviewed by the people you will work for and with. Do not expect that your own assessment during your interview about "could I work with these people" will necessarily apply to the actual people you work with. - There's a good chance your direct manager may work in a completely different city. Despite using videoconferencing extensively to work around this as much as possible, there remain problems with such long-distance interaction, starting with some people taking videoconference meetings far more lightly than they would a scheduled physical meeting. - It's cliquey. Some people are cool and others are not. Will you be one of the cool ones?

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Faithlife Response
11y
I'm sorry you were frustrated by your experience. Software development is a team of 90+ people, and you are correct that who interviews you may not be who you are on a team with; that's likely to be true in many larger organizations. We're shifting team sizes and assignments frequently as projects complete and priorities change. I appreciate your detailed assessment, and I think you make some good points: we do have a lack of rules, and that comes with good and bad things. Without a big book of Company Rules, there is no assurance that Manager A will act just like Manager B in the same situation. On the other hand, presumably each manager knows more about the specifics of the situation before them than The Author of the Rules. But it can lead to inconsistency. I recognize that we can help address some of this with more management training and conversation, and that process is underway. It's probably going to continue to be a problem, though, and it's likely we'll continue to choose 'no rules' over 'big rule book' into the future. That takes continued conversation as well as a willingness to make an appeal when you disagree. And I know that's not everyone's style; I think we'll continue to be a great workplace for people who dislike rules and are willing to be part of the conversation. I think we'll be a more frustrating workplace for people who want it all spelled out with clarity and consistency in advance. We're a participatory place. You're also right that there are cultural differences between the software development and sales departments. Some of this comes from the healthy tension between Dan and me, and some from the job functions. Sales is a more competitive, numbers-on-the-board kind of job. Software development is often a quieter, thinking-alone-for-hours job. They draw different people and develop different cultures; one tends to feed competition in terms of performance, the other in terms of technical smarts. In both cultures -- and throughout the company -- these different patterns in work culture should be tempered by an overlay of kindness and respect, and that's our goal. But as you point out, sometimes the policy isn't permeating the whole organization, and we'll continue to work on that. Thanks again for taking the time to provide feedback. -- Bob

Explore other reviews about Faithlife

5.0
May 16, 2023
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Powerful and tangible mission connected throughout the organization. Exciting growth opportunities across the business. Vision to develop as a modern technology company. New and experienced executive team leading change.

Cons

Modernizing all functions takes adjustment.

2
avatar
Faithlife Response
3y
Thank you for sharing your thoughts about your experience! We're glad to hear you value our mission and are excited about growth opportunities across the businesses. We’re committed to developing as a high-tech company and are fortunate to have a dedicated executive team leading the way. Your feedback is valuable as we continue to drive positive change across the organization. We're here to support you and work to create an even better employee experience.
3.0
Feb 3, 2024
Software engineer ii
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

For a long time Faithlife was the Christian software company, and there are tons of incredibly skilled software engineers, QA, product people there, and literally everyone I interacted with was awesome. Faithlife's founder and initial CEO was a Microsoft Software Engineer and he created a culture that values technical excellence and growth greatly. Technical debt was rarely suffered for long and engineers were afforded great leeway (and expected) to improve and modernize applications and tooling. Note that I don't know if the above has changed. Team leads are always open to engineers taking the lead on new feature development and developing leadership experience. Moving between teams is a regular occurrence and the relationship between development teams are often extremely good and team coordination and cooperation is generally really good. Team leads are well trained and the ones I had experience with were great at leading theie teams both technically and from a more leadership oriented approach.

Cons

The elephant in the room: the 2022 layoffs were very rough and brought a lot of management and leadership issues to everyone's attention. Faithlife has always been a mission driven organization but it isn't clear that the mission is embraced by the ownership of the company as it is by the rank and file. There is tension between it's stated mission and it's profit driven nature, and how that factors into the decisions the company makes. The departure of the founder/CEO Bob Pritchett brought with it a lot of cultural changes and uncertainties (and layoffs) and made it feel like that tension was leaning a lot more in favor of profit goals over mission. The above is purely my observations derived from my own feelings. If you're not a Christian of some flavor you will likely be uncomfortable working hear given the company's mission; though ironically I had fewer conversations about faith here than anywhere else I have ever worked. There was definitely a pressure to try to make the company more friendly to non-believers but it kind of made it weird for those who were (maybe an over correction). On-call rotations were pretty demanding for some teams with engineers being on call one week a month or even more frequently, and being responsible for services and applications they didn't touch as part of their day to day responsibilities. Likewise given the nature of the software being on call often meant being woken up at odd hours on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday and being unable to attend your own church services. Being a remote employee was actually a better experience prior to Covid rather than after. A lot of social activities were remote friendly pre-covid (and handled well) while post covid many simply stopped happening altogether. Faithlife rewards being broadly capable as an engineer over being really experienced and deeply knowledgeable in a particular area. Not necessarily a con, but still a point to mention. It can be really hard to stand out and get promoted to a higher tier Engineer role. Faithlife's expectations for the software development roles are really, really high, and given that there are so many extremely skilled engineers it can be tough to move up. Pay and benefits aren't really competitive with the sheer skills and responsibilities expected for the role levels.

9
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