Pros
The company pays well for the Seattle area, benefits and work/life balance are amazing. Some incredibly amazing and talented people to work with.
Cons
Leadership is messy at best, a lot of conflict with decision making due to leaders “empowering” teams to decide best path forward which oftentimes results in conflicting goals being championing by cross functional teams. Decisions are oftentimes made without full examination of downstream effects resulting in complete 180’s when the negative outcomes of not well thought out decisions are realized. Too many meetings and not enough time to actually work. There are meetings about the meeting about the meeting about the meeting, ad infinitum. And then lots of side meetings about those meetings to change decisions even after consensus is seemingly made in the larger group meetings. There is a lot of backstabbing and manipulation happening as well as a lot of people unqualified to do their jobs without a lot of direction/course correction. They even have a term for it...they call it ‘REI nice’. The co-op is incredibly scared of Amazon and it’s future relevancy but isn’t making steps to actually change. Believing instead that it’s history as outdoors experts will help them weather the storm. Too many leadership people at HQ who have never worked anywhere else in their careers so have no idea how to work differently or better. These are good people, nice people and well meaning people who just, unfortunately, don’t have the appropriate experience and/or outside perspectives to take the business forward. There is a very strong culture of “this is how we’ve always done it” that pervades the company. And sadly, no top leaders who are willing to or know how to step in and make the changes necessary. The co-op has a strong desire to diversify and be more inclusive of minorities (sexual as well as race) but it isn’t reflected in the organization in a meaningful way. If you identify in this category be prepared to really feel your ‘otherness’. Speaking of a non-inclusive environment, if you aren’t gun-ho into the outdoors it doesn’t matter in the slightest how good you are at your job...you will feel constantly judged and eventually will be pushed out. (By outdoors they mean scaling mountains, living in the wilderness for weeks, ice axing and other extreme outdoors adventures not casual Sunday hikes) As my boss said “non-outdoors folk are kinda like a virus that the good bacteria will get rid of”
