Jul 19, 2021
Substantial Associate Principal Engineer reviews
5.0
100% would recommend to a friend
Carey Jenkins
100% approve of CEO
100% positive business outlook
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Reviews by job title
2 reviews
5.0
Oct 9, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook
Pros
* Great work-life balance; overtime is quite rare. * Kind, intelligent people from top to bottom. I'd like to emphasize this. It feels a safe place to make honest mistakes. * Huge retention, people tend to stay for years and years and years. * New project every few months; I find this helps at keeping the wanderlust and boredom away. * Mostly greenfield projects; somewhat rare to get dumped into a mess of legacy code. * Latest tech used whenever appropriate; I've done elixir, react-native, react, typescript, swift, rails, node, c#, container services, all sorts of good resume-building stuff. * Small project teams of 3-5 mean that individual contributions matter and teams set their own processes and procedures (usually lightweight kanban.) * Project teams often rule through consensus rather than fiat, hardly anyone ever pulls rank. * Company was quick to respond to the COVID threat; abandoned our fancy office and went remote a few days or weeks earlier than everyone else in the area; I'll always appreciate the care upper-management took to keep us safe, we didn't know if everyone going remote was going to work or not. * Still doing well financially as a company since COVID. * Layoffs are few and far between, with none on the horizon. * $1,000/year self-directed education fund (use for conferences, books, classes, etc.) * Consistent commitment to continuous improvement and diversity. * Unabashedly Seattle liberal; the company closed for mourning when Trump was elected in 2016 and the company supported BLM by matching donations, giving free pro bono work for local organizations, and placing outward-facing signage on the office windows.
Cons
* Short projects mean that you'll likely never gain deep and authoritative expertise in any particular technology; just enough to get successful at using it. * You're up close to the client, and they're part of the team, and they can suck or be dysfunctional; soft skills and tact are unusually important for devs. * Clients are often in businesses that are stable but not changing the world; financial industries, marketing websites, shopping carts, etc. * Yearly salary bumps are good but complicated. They're calculated by comparing your salary to the median salary of similar jobs in Seattle and modifying it based on your growth and contributions. All good so far.. But the median salary survey excludes top-paying companies like Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, so the median isn't actually the median, which feels misleading and weird as that's likely where you would go if you would leave. I find the other benefits to outweigh the obvious salary misalignment, but it's a concern. * It's a job, not a mission, or a startup investment; no matter how long you work there you'll never earn any shares or gain a fraction of ownership of the company. If the owner gets bored and sells or someone makes an offer too good to refuse, who knows what'll happen to the employees that were there for years.
