Pros
PROS: + Great people + Best office space ever + Pretty flat org chart + Liberal WFH policy + Good hardware / software choices & desks + The boutique player in a niche market + Not yet public Not for everyone, as evidenced by the incredible range of opinions here, as well as by the fairly high turnover rate for employees. I can relate because this is one of the coolest places I’ve ever worked and one of the most frustrating. Relativity thinks of itself as entrepreneurial tech startup with a Midwestern (Chicago) flare, and in many ways that’s the TL;DR. At nearly 800 people it’s starting to feel the growing pains of typical companies at this stage in their development. The bright and visionary founder & CEO can (and does) change courses with the wind, and will expect the company to follow suit at light speed. Relativity is very deliberate about their culture including one not listed directly in their hallowed core values: A culture of feedback. This is so much a part of the company that many of the older critiques listed by others seem to describe a company other than the one I currently work for, proof that the company has heard the complaints and acted on them. Examples: • Complaint: Work From Home (WFH) is discouraged, frowned upon, etc. o Actuality: On any given day, it seems half the company is WFH. On my own team of 18 people, I had 7 people that worked remotely more often than in the office. • Complaint: Lack of diversity amongst employees o Actuality: I’ve worked in a huge public university system, the US Government, a manufacturer, and trading firms, and this is the most diverse place I’ve worked in forty years. Also, they define “diversity” quite broadly. It’s a true strength of the firm. Research suggests that firms either “talk about diversity”, or live it. Relativity lives it, but I am a little worried because of late, they’ve begun to talk about it as well. • Complaint: “Amateur hour”. o Actuality: I had to laugh at this one a bit because I get it. Where other tech firms want to hire the smartest guy in the room; Relativity will only make room for that person if he / she (I am paraphrasing the company owner) “is not a ” […~jerk]. Rather, they hire smart, motivated people who appreciate & live the core values, and provide an environment where they can succeed. Some fresh grads, others industry vets. The Chicago HQ has the coolest office spaces I’ve ever been in (much less worked in): Every desk is adjustable to stand or sit; they provide great hardware & software for employees; there are deep window sills you can actually sit on, or put your teams books or cool artifacts on; four “break-out areas” on each of the four floors and several “pantries” stocked with fresh fruit, soft-drinks, tea & coffee and tons of VC enabled conference rooms and large training areas. The main cafeteria has ping-pong, old school video games and there’s a “Zen room” for napping ( / meditating / …). What you won’t see are hard (desktop) phones. IT encourages the use of one or more soft-phone applications instead, with mixed results. The building is remodeling the lobby so there are issues with badging in, hopefully soon to be resolved. Hopefully they bring some of the restaurants back too. There’s a 23rd floor rooftop deck and a gym with a $50 lifetime membership The people are awesome; particularly the C* level folks, each of them extremely driven, competent, and yet very approachable. The individual contributors too, to a person, are very helpful, positive, hard-working, and thirsty for knowledge and success.
Cons
CONS: - Thinly staffed compared to expectations of growth, change - Long & risky onboarding times - Extremely fast rate of change, often for change’s sake, often without breathing to see if the last change actually worked - Obsession with metrics: often inaccurate, duplicative, and contradictory - Very high turnover, and not everyone leaves of their own accord It’s the middle management that needs help: the Director / Sr. Manager folks need to find time to talk to each other it seems. Anecdotes: • I got an email / text / call from a Director (or higher) complaining that a square on “the dashboard” is red, or the number too high (or low). What dashboard, you may ask? I did. I was pointed to one I had not known about, nor had my team been told about it, trained on it, or had any input in creating it. This was not a one off, but happened at least a half-dozen times with different dashboards (in one case a spreadsheet) and different higher-ups. I would have to reverse-engineer the genesis of the “bad mark” across multiple teams and technologies. Only occasionally would this be indicative of an actual issue or problem my team or another internal team could move the needle on. Many dashboards are duplicative and at time contradictory. The company is obsessed with metrics (in fairness, the mission statement begins “Organize Data…”) and “dashboards” which more often than not are really “reports” (i.e. not real-time) but they are often. Unfortunately, this level of scrutiny surveillance does not help build trust. • The “culture of feedback” leads some to ignore the “tell-me-first” rule: If you have a problem, please let me know first, so I can help better meet (or at least properly set) your expectations. There’s a veteran director who sat in the office adjacent to mine, but would regularly send emails to large (e.g. 150 people) distribution lists calling out perceived short-comings of my team, and this would be my (and the team’s) first exposure to the incident in question. My boss kindly forwarded an email from a guy I hadn’t yet met complaining about my lack of ownership over a problem which was completely beyond my control. One of the CIO’s new hires and rising stars sent an email to her boss about what she perceived as my lack of engagement on a project, …. She personally never mentioned this to me before or since, nor frankly, did the CIO except to copy me to an email to my boss (accidentally, I think) describing the dire consequences. • I do not feel “entitled” to free coffee provided by my employer, but will certainly take them up on the offer. The old single-serve machines were nearly all removed and replaced with much larger, fancier machines with touch-screens and cappuccino and multiple choices… I applauded this because I always felt guilty about the environmental cost of k-cups, but … it happened without any announcement or fanfare, and the newer machines were less reliable and would have messages on the touchscreen saying “Swab the foredeck”, or whatever, but the error state had no instructions on how to do that. Again, not complaining about free coffee (we could be discussing release names), but providing a metaphor with how frenetic change was managed (or not) and communicated throughout the company. Despite the accelerated pace of change, there are a few sacred cows: • Goofy team names. (Teams name themselves arbitrary things, so it’s hard to get help on e.g. the fubar component because the responsible team is called El Duderino or somesuch. • The RCA rite of passage. On the footnote of an addendum to your offer letter will be a clause that says something like “As a condition of your employment you will be required to pass the Relativity Certified Administrator exam with a score of 80% or more. You will be given 60 days to do so.” You’ll get three shots at it and they’ll sequester you away from your group so that they’re paying you for theoretically doing nothing but studying for this notoriously difficult exam. If you don’t pass, they let you go. (This is not really highlighted during the interview process, as you might imagine.) When your teams are already very thinly staffed, and you know that best case (i.e. you already know the ideal candidate to replace someone who quit today, and he/she happens to be available immediately) you’re still more than 30 days away from having someone in the seat, you have zero incentive to manage low performers out. Do be careful when you decide to leave: Have your t’s crossed and I’s dotted: Your last day is when health coverage ends, not EOM. They will tell you money in your transit FSA will buy you that least train ticket, but it won’t,etc. At the end of the day, I am glad for the time I spent at this unique firm, and most especially for the great folks and some interesting technology I got to work with there. I always had the feeling that the place “Used to be a great firm”, or “Could one day be a great firm” once they get past these growing pains.
