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RealSelf

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RealSelf Software Engineer II reviews

3.0

2% would recommend to a friend

(5 total reviews)

Minou Clark

Not enough data to show CEO approval

Ratings by category

5.0

Career opportunities

4.0

Culture & values

4.0

Diversity & inclusion

4.0

Work/Life balance

4.0

Senior management

3.0

Compensation and benefits

Ratings by demographic groups

Reviews by job title

5 reviews
5.0
Mar 12, 2019

Cooperative, Open Culture

Software engineer ii
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Biggest pro by far is an a culture that values open communication and cooperation. I constantly reached out to other dev teams with product/engineering questions, and I was never reprimanded for frequently offering help where I could. There are several "help please" and "department-xxx-questions" slack channels where employees can ask questions which sometimes spawn 20+ response threads filled with great, engaged answers and discussion. Even when disagreement and problems come about due to complications and deadlines, it always felt like we were working together instead of against each other. Managers are also good; I highly respect about 50% of the ones I've met, and the ones that aren't the best still aren't bad compared to what I've seen before. The dev-managers are all at least very capable engineers, and tend toward not managing enough rather than over managing/micro managing.

Cons

Re-orgs are a common occurrance. It looks like teams are shuffled and priorities change about every year, which sometimes make long term initiatives hard to keep alive if started at all (tech debt refactoring, security concerns, difficult UX bugs). As a result, theres a lot of mixed architecture and dangling initiatives everywhere. Also the company went from being a small team to a mid-size one quite rapidly, so at least at the time of writing there are a bunch of new engineers with a wealth of the knowledge locked in a handful of old-timers. Not that they haven't been willing to communicate or document it; they have for quite a few things. But sometimes it feels like we're constantly going to them for new insights/knowledge. It probably ties into the inability to really refactor. Finally, the company has been on unstable ground as of late. I'm not fit to analyze the business side of things, but its obvious that the future is very uncertain. Despite all this, this is still a 5 star rating. I can't overstate how important work culture is in enjoying your day to day, and this place is the best I've seen yet.

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RealSelf Response
7y
We appreciate your insightful and thoughtful feedback, and are so happy that you’re enjoying the collaborative, supportive culture. I hope you’ve also noticed our increased focus on planning and discipline around working the plan. If you have questions about this, please let an executive know. Your callout about technical debt and mixed architecture is accurate and the exact reason why it is now a top priority to put in the work needed to revamp key areas of our tech stack. We've started this quarter on building our next generation front-end framework. Our team is focused on improving developer efficiency, building a fast and responsive website, and fostering deeper collaboration with our UX design team. Thank you again for your helpful review!
5.0
Jun 18, 2018

(mostly) Smooth Sailing through Perpetual Growth

Software engineer-ii
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The item which I joined by remains the same so far & is still the strongest reason I could give to work here: People & the company seem to genuinely care/respect your life outside of work. It might be an offshoot of the company's focus, but there's a recurring feeling of the focus being on people & solving social problems vs. seeing things as process & technology-first. It never feels like hours-in-seat are the metric people are watching for above all else (the office is a ghost town by 6pm), it's easy enough to work remotely to avoid disruption when you have an appointment or the like, there isn't the same Alpha Macho tone you can see at times in the industry, I see strong support for families... Ultimately, it's somewhere I feel like I can work at long-term without constantly worrying that the other shoe is about to drop, and that goes a long ways for letting me just focus on what I'm supposed to be doing. Also, points for noticing when the company was going to go through a social inflection point from "small & scrappy startup where everybody can know everybody else" to "large enough to need defined roles" and hiring on a team to smooth out that transition. I've seen startups run into a lot of trouble at that point, and this was the smoothest I've ever seen that go.

Cons

Balancing "best practices" vs. immediate benefit is always tricky. Even as much as the company has grown, there's still way more each person/team in Product/Engineering could be doing at any given time than there is space to pick each potential item up. As a result, there's always the tradeoff of "does this move the metrics? If not, what's the tangible value of it?", which while necessary does occasionally leave some longing for "doing things right", so to speak. The flip side to being focused on social problems & business framing is that tech decisions are very pragmatic. This works well for me, but if you're looking for a space to work on cutting-edge "ML + Blockchain + React" type greenfield projects, you'll probably end up bored.

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RealSelf Response
8y
Thank you for the review and feedback. I'm glad to see some of the things we're doing are working as designed, and appreciate the feedback and insight into the areas where we can improve. I'm available and would be happy to spend some time discussing your feedback if there is anything you'd like to discuss in-depth. Like you, we've noticed the challenges that lie between business pragmatism and software idealism. We're working to adjust the way we set goals and measure progress to allow sprint teams and the technology team at large to tackle these issues without feeling like they're costing time against the business goals. Some projects that don't move the currently-focused metric can impact the business in a very positive way. We need to work at evaluating those items and correctly prioritize them with all of the other work we need to do, Scott, Anthony and I are working to make this happen. We will keep trusting you and appreciate your continued trust in us - only by working together can we see all of the places where we can improve and continue to push the company to new heights - please keep the constructive feedback coming! -- Matt, CTO
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