Pros
As a long-tenured employee, I've seen Splice move forward dramatically as a company over the past 2-3 years. For it's size and age, it is out-performing in many areas: - Splice has essentially cleaned house of under-performing, over-promoted middle/upper management that most middle-stage tech startups suffer from, and instituted exceptional regular manager training. - The company culture is optimistic, supportive, and appreciate. Regular shoutouts and celebration of work encourages collaboration and positivity. - Many leaders are receptive to feedback if it's delivered respectfully and carefully. They seem to have an earnest desire to learn and listen. - Executive leaders have a genuine respect for our customers and community, though they are occasionally naive/ignorant to their specific needs. - Work-life balance is fantastic, with unlimited time off, two weeks of mandatory vacation (summer and christmas), and little to no "implicit" pressure to work on weekends or holidays.
Cons
- Salaries are medium-low, haven't increased in tandem with the financial success of the company, and are barely keeping up with inflation. You can expect to make about half of what you would at a major tech company in terms of TC (total comp). This is reasonable for a highly unprofitable early stage startup seeking to maximize runway, but not for Splice's situation. A long-touted recent overhaul of the comp structure resulted mostly in demotions and no pay changes. - Product and engineering middle-managers are risk-averse, frequently misaligned, and tend to get stuck in analysis paralysis for months (if not longer). Because of this, we struggle to put resources behind significant product improvements and instead spend months on engineering infrastructure with a few bug-fixes thrown in. As such, the main product has barely changed in 3 years outside of a single large launch (Create) and some small feature iterations and tech stability improvements. Splice can feel like an oppressively stodgy environment for creative and ambitious contributors to product development. Our customers see this, and over the years, the company's reputation in the music producer community has suffered as we are viewed as regrettably necessary sample library with an annoying pricing model. - Many middle managers in engineering have learned a tendency to be over-protective of their teams and demand unrealistic or shifting requirements in order to work on customer priorities determined by PMs, contributing to the stagnant products/feature problem described above.
