Vantaggi
1) Fair base salaries for roles requiring some technical or software engineering experience; if you can spin up and debug a simple website, Drift has many positions requiring your technical abilities. In my two years with Drift, I also received a sizable bonus payout quarterly, with the exception of March 2023 when the company experienced another round of layoffs. 2) Unlimited PTO and true encouragement to use; non-standard working hours were common for folks who worked with their manager to set up a cadence that fit their lifestyle. The culture at Drift supports people sharing their experiences on PTO, and Slack is filled with pictures and videos of how people took advantage of this benefit. 3) Strong department heads across the company, trending in the right direction at the VP and C-level after some recent turnover. A great place to learn from a strong mentor in the software industry. 4) Dedicated coworkers. The entire professional services team at Drift is composed of people who have truly internalized Drift's guiding principle of, "keep the customer at the center of everything you do." You will meet some absolute mavericks by working here! 5) Drift is ideally positioned in the Revenue-Technology space as a platform that impacts Web, Marketing Automation, CRM, Business Intelligence systems to produce results. If you want to begin a career in marketing, sales, sales operations, or just generally learn about the software development lifecycle at a company with a super-extensible, API-supported technology, THIS IS THE PLACE. In the time I spent working with the Drift platform, I feel like my professional skills expanded by leaps and bounds.
Svantaggi
Like most companies in early 2023, Drift has gone through several rounds of layoffs over the past 7 months. This puts a lot of pressure on customer-facing teams to not only service existing relationships, but to take on additional workload no longer handled by former coworkers. This is compounded by many of Drift's customers experiencing the same kind of employee turnover on their go-to-market teams, meaning that stakeholders on both sides of the relationship were often approaching management of the Drift platform as total strangers without historical context for how or why things were done, or where the strategic vision for conversational marketing was leading. For many customer stakeholders already handling additional duties, the task of fully realizing a conversational marketing strategy with Drift, or inheriting one from incumbents, became quite daunting. Although Drift offers robust professional services that can make the platform almost entirely turnkey, these services represented an additional charge that in many cases did not fit their shrinking marketing budgets. This meant that Drift's professional services team became increasingly relied upon as "lifesavers" for Drift's AEs and CSMs, requesting concessions to save accounts at renewal, instead of serving as a constructive asset to help move accounts forward in platform adoption and maturity. This ratcheted up the stakes of being in proserve, as it made success feel like an existential project to help keep as many good, experienced AEs and CSMs on the team as possible as Drift navigates these tough financial times. Each request for PS-assistance felt less and less like a new opportunity to be curious and challenge myself, and felt more and more like an urgent triage of an unhealthy customer to help keep my friends and teammates in sales and customer-success gainfully employed. When you read the reviews and you hear that, "Drift is not for everyone," this is why it was not for me, personally. I had to step away from the job as I felt like the work was contributing to a sense of dread that we weren't going to be able to save all our customers, and that was going to mean another round of layoffs where I'd have to say goodbye to people I trusted and respected. I lost the ability to separate the curiosity and creativity of creating conversational solutions from the need to do these projects in order to retain net-dollars. Perhaps others will view this circumstance differently, for example, there was absolutely no lack of work to do and for someone who can compartmentalize this better, the opportunity to lean in and get your hands dirty is immense...