Engineering is good - Software Engineer The RealReal Employee Review

4.0
May 12, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There are tons of opportunities to contribute. I'm pretty junior as developers go, but I've been involved heavily in creating the mobile web product, reengineering the checkout process, reorganizing the home page, and creating several features from scratch. Senior devs are good, and management within engineering is good. They take the time to partner with you, sit with you through code reviews, talk about business implications of features to excite you, and to generally show you the ropes of being a startup engineer. They encourage you to try out new technologies (Famo.us, Angular, Elastic Search) and bring them into the stack where appropriate. There are regular feedback sessions that align expectations. Dev team is fun. We play ping pong all the time and chill after work together. The CTO goes out of his way to get us toys (kegerator, xbox one, etc) for particularly hard pushes that impact the bottom line. Last point - the tech team seeks out best practices and does its best to implement them. We run on 2 week sprints and use Pivotal Tracker. We have retrospectives that genuinely improve our sprints as we move along. I feel like my suggestions are taken seriously.

Cons

Location is terrible - you'll need to have some form of transportation or be okay with 45 min of bussing around to get to the place. Consequently, food choices at lunch are limited, though there are a few healthy and tasty options around. Firing isn't always done the most diplomatic way. We've had to cut slack, but I'm not sure the way we did the cutting was the best. We hire Indian sub contractors to do some portions of our code base that aren't customer-facing. My biggest complain with our tech process is that we use these sub contractors - communicating with them can be hard, and even as a junior dev I can tell some of their code is wonky and hard-to-read. Their involvement is pretty limited, and I deal with there code spaghetti pretty rarely.

Explore other reviews about The RealReal

5.0
May 8, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Overall, the receiving team is very sweet and engaging. They try to help you when you need it or ask for it.

Cons

When you don't reach your goal, they do get on you/

2.0
Jul 17, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Great coworkers - Handle fun products - Front line works their tails off

Cons

- Senior Leaders (some Sr. Mgrs, mainly Directors and up) really don't do much but sit in meetings and blame their teams for their leadership deficiencies. Not to mention they love to never be in office but can't wait to tell you why you should be there. - Changes are constant: Quality Standards, SOPs, Order of Ops, CRM - With little to no training or guidance. The 3 auth centers operate "the same" but really there are drastic process differences in each along with leadership. - Leaders do anything to deflect blame and responsibility. The front lines are worked to exhaustion with unrealistic goals (if TRR was serious about their standards and what they offer).. Rather, people process at lightning speeds just to fill the warehouse with garbage. - Sr leaders of Operations quell issues and disguise problems to C Suite - Toxicity within leadership, everyone is playing defense which does not help solving problems. - No feedback is taken, ideas are shot down. - Vacations/breaks dont exist if you are a leader. No respect for time off. - Churn and churn. Front line staffing is a revolving door.

1
See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All