Declining fast, jump ship - Software Engineer Faithlife Employee Review

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.

Modernizing all functions takes adjustment.

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.

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.