Opower reviews

The best reason to work at OPOWER are the startup culture, the nice managers, and the friendliness of the employees.

OPOWER is executing very well on a tremendous opportunity to make a big difference in how we think about energy conservation in this country. Everyone is tightly focused on the goal of helping consumers save energy, from the sales and product teams, through the engineering organization and down through the operations group. Communication between the teams is very open and transparent, and everyone is remarkably open to ideas on how to do *anything* better. There's no cross-disciplinary defensiveness, and everyone I've worked with so far is remarkably competent at what they do. Everyone so far has also been remarkably generous with their time. Technical and product documentation on the wiki is very complete for an organization this size, and the new-hire process (getting userids/laptop/building keys/etc) was surprisingly smooth, also for an organization this size. There are some bumps needing to be managed around the torrid pace of growth, but that's a high-class kind of problem to have. The office environment is very social and engaged, but people are respectful if you've got a deadline and need to focus. Plenty of places to hunker down in a quiet corner if you need to. The product development team is very forward thinking in two ways: one, test engineering requires software engineers who are interested in testing, instead of just looking for button pushers; two, the development engineers are incredibly deeply invested in unit and integration testing and in supporting the test engineers on system level and acceptance testing.