11y
Thank you for your feedback! Many of us share your enthusiasm for our company, leadership and engineering group (93% affirming NR as a Great Place to Work in the recent Fortune Mag. survey!). Your view of the Support organization as a barrier to growth, however, appears to be more of an outlier.
We are committed to making it possible for Relics to grow, advance, and thrive working at New Relic. And we have had more than a little success with that. Some of the reasons your comments surprise me:
* Voluntary turnover in the Support group is lower than the company average.
* Even better, an exceptional 98% of Support would recommend - or highly recommend - the company as a great place to work (from our March pulse survey, with a majority of Support responding).
* In the last 12 months, seven Support Relics moved into other groups, all but one into developer roles in Engineering. Said differently, 10% of the group made such moves. (This is, btw, more than double the number of Relics who left Support for developer jobs outside NR!)
* Many more Relics in Support were recognized for their professional and technical growth during this period.
Your other point, proximity in the office, will continue to be challenging. We outgrew our Portland office space and needed to separate some groups. The cost of success. This has made the task of keeping Support and Engineering aligned is more important than ever.
Despite the 23 floors of separation, Support engineers are present every day for stand-up meetings with our Agent engineering teams. Most days, there are one or more paired programming or debugging teams, with engineers from both groups working together. This connectivity is essential to the vitality of our products, and to the intellectual health of the company.
We are proud of this Support group that provides 24/7 global support for hundreds of thousands of New Relic users – and does so with grace, gumption, and great technical insight.
I don't doubt that your own experience is less positive that some of what I outlined above. I would strongly encourage you to talk with Julie (PeopleOps in PDX,), the next level up in your own management, or me so we can better understand and address your concerns. We need Relics like you to voice your ideas to keep us working effectively as a team. I hope you take up my offer.
Regards,
Steve McElfresh
VP, People
