Goodreads reviews

Goodreads is 10 years old, and was acquired by Amazon a few years ago. We get a lot of benefit from being part of Amazon, but also maintain a lot of the awesome, independent Goodreads culture. The best part about Goodreads is the employees. Everyone is brilliant, passionate, and just plain nice. There is a lot of work to do, but the workload is manageable. When people stay late at the office, it's typically to play games! There are a bunch of perks, but it's not obscene like you'll see at other tech companies—no giant chrome pandas here (though we do have an inflatable whale). We get free breakfast and lunch a couple times a week, 10% time to work on passion projects, tons of free books, snacks, a keg, team outings, a twice-yearly company-wide fun day, career development budget, team outings, volunteer opportunities, multiple book clubs—including a Chinese book club and a feminist book club—and did I mention books!? But what really keeps me motivated and proud to work at Goodreads is our underlying mission: helping people read more and share their ideas—a worthy goal!

When I was at Goodreads, I would read and discuss every review that came on to Glassdoor. I loved seeing the feedback, although I wished there was a way to ask follow up questions. I think all the feedback in my review has already been given in person to people still at the company, but in case people have questions they want to ask - I was the manager for the SF services team. One note about the star ratings. I think it's always tricky with 1-5 star ratings, since everyone has their own scale. For this review, it will be linear. 1 star = 20th percentile, etc. Overall I think Goodreads is definitely in the top 20% of companies - assuming you are interested in working for a large company. First pro of Goodreads is undoubtedly that they have done an amazing job of culturally including people despite the massive growth they've experienced. When a company doubles in size in a short time period, especially when it goes through an acquisition, I expect there to be a large divide between the veterans and the rookies. It's not the case at Goodreads. I attribute this to a few things. One, there is a large focus on hiring friendly people that you would be willing to sit next to. Two, it's been culturally ingrained that most social events are open to all, and invites go out in the company chat room all the time. Game nights, movie nights, whiskey tastings, etc - everyone knows and is invited to these things. It's an open office with a good lunch room, so you also get lots of spontaneous discussion happening. Spending casual time with people was one of my favorite things at Goodreads. Second, most (all?) of the people at Goodreads care. It may be about the product, it may be about the company culture, it may be about the engineering problems - but people care about something. It's refreshing to be at a big company and not deal with apathetic people. More than anything, this is what gives me faith about the future of Goodreads. There are definitely issues, but there are people who care deeply about those issues trying to address them. Books. Not everyone loves them, but if you do, it's great at GR. I loved opening all the books that publishers would send us, and it's awesome hearing your favorite authors talk about using Goodreads. Authors will come to the SF office to speak and hold a Q&A, which is always great. Books are why I joined the company, and I wasn't disappointed. Interesting problems. Goodreads is at the forefront of what is happening with reading. The roles of book stores and publishers are in flux. Changes you make are seen by millions of people. Work you do might change the direction of the future of reading. It's often easy to get lost in the weeds at GR, and the vision isn't very clear - but every once in a while you'll be reminded exactly how big the future is.