Life Could Not Better Be
Pros
Before I get into the pros, I want to say that I've been putting off writing this review for almost a year and a half. When I was first hired, I wanted to wait until I had a good amount of time at the company before I shared my thoughts. Then, as I got a better idea of the company, writing a review became somewhat daunting because there were *so* many great things I wanted to mention. I recently took an hour or so to write my brother-in-law to tell him why he should seriously consider working at this company though, so I'll use some of those talking points here, and hopefully this review can do justice to how I feel about this company. 1. The first thing that amazed me about this company was all of the glassdoor reviews, and how each one was thoughtfully responded to by the CFO (at the time). I could not believe that the CFO would take the time to read and respond to every review. Little did I know, the leadership team reads every review and takes into account the words written. To me, that speaks volumes to the caliber of people leading this organization. Unlike any other company I've worked for, it's clear that the company (and its executives) care about the employees. About a month ago I had my "get to know you" lunch, where the CEO sat down with me and about 7 other colleagues, and we just talked for 2 hours. (They try to meet with everyone in the company once a year) He wanted to get to know us, where we're from what brought us to Catalyst, and he wanted to hear what advice we had for him, and what we'd change about the company if we could. He had our bios printed up when he came in, and it was so clear that he cared about us individually. 2. Another thing that I couldn't believe that I found out shortly after I joined was the level of transparency that exists within the company. We have a meeting every month where we discuss the state of the company, how well we're doing, what the financials look like, things we need to improve, what happened in the latest board meeting, etc. These are things that in most companies are not shared with its employees. There is a level of trust that is humbling to see, starting at the top and working all the way down to my manager. 3. I know this review is for the company, but I can't not talk about my specific team (the platform team -- a group of 25-30 software engineers, mostly). I feel like this team has contributed significantly to my overall satisfaction with Health Catalyst as well. Never before have I worked with a team of such smart people, people that are so eager to help, and people that are humble in the most amazing way. There's never any sense of braggadocio or egoism, very little backbiting, and just a general sense of goodwill. Aside from the cultural aspect, I feel like the leaders of the platform team have done an incredible job setting a foundation for our team to be successful. We have lots of autonomy to perform the tasks we need to in the way we see best; they trust us to do our work, and don't micromanage in the least; they understand we're not perfect, and continually try to shape the team to be more effective and productive, always improving. When I first interviewed, I remember talking to one of the original members of the platform team, and he said he relished the idea of having an "open plot of ground" where he could put into place (or sow) the principles he believed would make a highly-functioning software development team. I'll be the first to acknowledge we're not perfect, but man am I impressed with the quality of the way our team is run. I've worked here for coming up on 18 months, and in all honesty, I bet I've thought about how lucky I was to get hired here more the half of those days as I walked out of the office. I have that thought over and over and over again. I love working for a company that cares about me and that values me. I love working for a company who is deeply concerned about helping people -- improving outcomes for our clients, so that their clients -- the patients -- can live longer, be healthier, and live better lives. I decided to title the review, "Life Could Not Better Be", partly because I like the movie "The Court Jester", but mostly because since I've started working for Health Catalyst, my quality of life has improved. Granted, my life isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I am much happier about the work I do, my work-life balance is much better than it used to do, and I genuinely get excited to go to work each morning.
Cons
There are some downsides to working at Health Catalyst. Even though the pros far far outweigh the cons, I'll give some minor things that tend to bug me: 1. Since the company still is relatively new, there are some things that just aren't as polished as they would be in a larger company. For example, (1) the intranet isn't so great; (2) people's pictures don't automatically get loaded into Outlook; (3) we don't have a directory where we can look up people by name and see their picture and what area they work in. (4) We don't have any easy way to get our password reset if we get locked out. Things like that come as a company matures, but we're not a mature company, so we don't have all of that. 2. Sometimes I see a division across teams regarding tools and decisions made that make me wonder when or if we'll ever align. I'm a little worried this could cause problems down the line. As one example, we use SQL Server, but other teams are using MySQL. Again, not a huge deal, but something I've noticed. 3. I wonder if we'll be able to hire good people that fit our culture and have the desired skillsets at a fast enough rate to be able to do all the things we'd like to.
