Pros
- I feel like I have a lot of autonomy over figuring out what to work on + how to implement it - Growing really fast, the future looks bright which I think keeps most people motivated to do a good job - I think basically everyone on engineering is trying to do a good job and usually has the skills to back it up - It's a relatively younger-leaning crowd which is something that I've enjoyed over other older-leaning companies I've worked at, culture-wise
Cons
- There's a good amount of tech debt that slows things down and makes things difficult to understand. And we're in a heavy growth phase so this is mostly a backburner issue (probably rightfully so), even though it increases overall workload. - Some teams often make technical decisions which seem very questionable, at least from the outside looking in, which leads to crazy complicated issues that are tough to undo - There's an infinite amount of work to do so it's up to you to control and manage it - The variance in code quality that some engineers/teams have versus others is pretty jarring - I'm sure everyone who gets promoted has done things do deserve it, but there are times when people at a higher level than me in the eng org do something as basic as not communicating important things to dependent teams in pursuit of a fast timeline, to the point that it creates a multi-week fiasco to try to patch it up. Sometimes, it shows that some people perhaps got promoted too quickly to a relatively high role, or are under so much pressure to deliver (often very directly from the CEO) that they forget to do some basic things - I know the cons list is longer than the pros list but overall if you either know or learn to control your career as an engineer you'll probably be fine, grow a bunch, and make great comp if Rippling IPO's