Feb 19, 2019
Intercom Response
7yTo the author:
“Toxic” is a word I just can’t accept anyone would want to use to describe Intercom. I’ve never heard anyone here say it before. If you really feel that way, we’re making incredible mistakes. Nobody should ever feel that way. If you’ve been here even a few months, you’ll have heard me speak at All Hands about my passion around building an organization that uniquely invests in and cares for its people.
If you actually want to be here, please mail me and let’s meet and talk and let’s fix this. Or talk to a leader in your org or to someone you trust who will advocate for you. If you don’t want to be here, please go somewhere you can be happy. Life’s way too short.
Either way, I’m sincerely wishing you well.
To the reader:
I’ll post here what I said on another post about our Product and Engineering teams in SF.
Every company has their strengths and weaknesses. Intercom’s strengths by far are in software development. It was founded by 4 people who studied CS with a simple desire to build cool tech. Read a few of our hundreds of posts on our blog about product and strategy, come to one of our events, talk to some of our engineers. You’ll get it instantly.
We have three offices which do software development. Dublin (7.5 years old), London (18 months old), SF (~2 years old). Dublin was started by the founders. It’s humming. People are highly engaged and super productive. Shipping incredible work. Our last engagement survey scored very high in most parts of that office. London similarly is killing it. It’s an incredible bunch of people. They got up to speed so fast. They scored extremely high. Importantly, London was seeded by Dublin folks. But unfortunately SF was an independent group that grew out of our former growth team and was only recently absorbed into our global R&D org 6 months ago. Before then we had a couple missteps with leaders and managers and definitely struggled to have SF and Dublin work together well. This is all changing rapidly because we now have SF reporting to our global Product and Engineering leaders. Both ourglobal heads of Product and Engineering who built Dublin and London are currently in SF making changes and have big plans for the future of SF R&D.
Personally I am EXTREMELY bullish on the future of SF R&D. There is already great things happening there, lots of amazing people, a couple new leaders coming on-board. Give it 2-3 quarters.