Pros
There are multiple factors on which one can evaluate a company and here are the ones which come to my mind as I fill this review:
1. Impact: Springboard is a company that genuinely cares for its mission of helping provide their customers with positive career outcomes. The potential of positive impact you can create here is huge. Every time you help a student learn a new skill enabling them to make a successful career transition, you're helping their entire family lead a better life. Education is indeed a great sector to work for!
2. Empathy: Springboard always strives to do the right thing. The level of empathy displayed by the organisation is huge. I believe this has been imbibed in the DNA of the organisation primarily by the founders. There are a multitude of examples of this such as Wellness Fridays (1 Friday off per month) to help people adjust to the new work from home routine and large initiatives to help surface root cause of concerns raised. As with any growing organisation, the speed of a decision sometimes ends up creating unanticipated unhappiness which Springboard tries its best to deal with retroactively.
3. People: The people at Springboard are genuinely nice people who have the right intentions. They are passionate about their work, constantly learning, and improving themselves personally. This helps provide a good peer set to get inspired from.
4. Learning: The potential for learning at Springboard is high. Personally speaking, it has introduced me to the web development sector, exposed me to decently cutting edge technology, helped me build skills for effective collaboration with great product teams, and also allowed me to hone up my people+delivery management skills. The company also takes learning as a serious value and allocates very significant budgets per person to help them learn anything they want to (yes, even poker!). Two great examples of Springboard taking learning to the next level: They try to enable role switches for people within the team and sometimes also accommodate requests that require someone to take a 3 month break to focus on a skillset. This being said, as with any company in the tough startup world, business needs often take priority over technically interesting projects which is usually understandable.
5. Compensation: The compensation at Springboard is good but not great. The really good thing on this front is the strive for transparency. The company does regular industry analysis to ensure they're aware of the standards, and also communicate information such as - 'We pay at the xth percentile of all top product based companies' to the team. Apart from this, there exist a bunch of perks such as a basic medical insurance, free lunch, free snacks (when in office), ad-hoc budgets for celebrations, free lunches with managers, team outing budget, and of course all the learning budgets discussed above.
6. Work life balance: Springboard places genuine emphasis on the happiness of its team, trying to ensure a good work life balance. Work here is much more structured than other startups and very rarely do you see someone pulling long hours or weekends. Even then, the rest of the team often encourages the person to instead re-initiate discussions on the timeline, rather than put themselves under pressure. Springboard also allows follows an unlimited leave policy, relying on its employees to best decide what helps them recharge. This being said, the work expected out of you definitely requires consistent efforts through the week every week.
In summary, Springboard is a great place to work at specially when you factor in the industry (education) the company is in.
Cons
There are a few organisations where you could probably learn at a faster pace, earn more, and have a slightly better work life balance.
Adding more of a personal note, I often find myself thinking about work outside of work hours, which did not happen at my earlier organisations. This is something which is more of a self management problem than a company problem, but it does also point to the decently high workload at Springboard.
A very significant con but something Springboard can't do much about - Due to the 2 office setup, you will sometimes be required to take early morning and/or late night calls. Springboard does try its best to limit the frequency of this, and I personally find myself doing this twice a week on an average. This sometimes does indeed affect how much you can mentally recharge between workdays.
However, I do genuinely believe that Springboard is trying to do its best to give its team the best workplace possible within the business limitations.
