FreshBooks

2,0

10 giu 2018

Consiglia

Gradimento del CEO

Pronostico commerciale

Vantaggi

Incredible open communication from executives, making strides towards an inclusive work environment, fantastic company events, parties and team building outings. I once considered this the best workplace I had encountered in my 10+ year career. Mike McDerment, the CEO, is an incredibly open and honest leader. He regularly gives talks at the weekly company "Short Hands" lunch gathering, discussing his thoughts and feelings about the direction of the company and other topics, as well as fielding questions. His willingness to engage with difficult questions, which are some times anonymous, is inspiring. For most of my time at FreshBooks I have enjoyed coming to the office to see my friends, chat with people at lunch, and having meaningful work that improves the lives of FreshBooks customers. 3 weeks of vacation (with yearly carry-over), plus a full Christmas break, 12 sick days, and plenty of fun company events and outings. Company parties every few months really help create bonds between people from different departments. 6 "Innovation Days" per quarter in the software development department are a great opportunity to direct your energy to things you feel are important. You could improve on some part of the app that stands out to you, find a team and collaborate on a complex project, or work on a talk for a conference. FreshBooks has also started on the journey to make a more "inclusive and diverse" work environment. This is a noble goal and I believe most of the people involved are doing so in good faith. FreshBooks is a very inclusive place to work based on your gender and identity, as we allow people to bring their authentic selves to work. That said, there are some ideological bullies in the committee leading this effort who may hamper their own efforts by alienating people.

Svantaggi

A dramatic shift in the social fabric of the company, onerous project development processes, weak product/software development leadership, and poor opportunities for advancement unless you land on the right team. My perspective comes from someone working on a software development team. I write some of these comments with a heavy heart because there has been quite a dramatic shift from the company I loved when I first started. There has been a dramatic shift in the social fabric of the company over the past year, with many long-tenure employees leaving and breaking down the old social networks that made coming to work so enjoyable. I believe that this is due to a lack of meaningful, ambitious work. The types of projects that teams have taken on in the past year feel less vital. Many of the people who have been leaving have been incredibly talented and were being under-utilized in their roles at FreshBooks. The software/project development process at FreshBooks is quite onerous; there is a top-down, design-by-committee system that is very difficult to fight against. We often write huge amounts of code to adhere to heavy-handed designs regardless of the software development costs. Projects that could take a month to build may take three due to "beautiful" design, landmines in the codebase and the inability to do much about either. There have been some significant leadership departures from my department over the past year and it feels like current leadership is overwhelmed and lacks direction. We rarely see or hear from developer leadership, who seem to have no goals or vision for the product or our application stack. As for advancement, if you are lucky to be on a development team who gets good projects you are likely to be promoted, but being stuck on a team with maintenance work or difficult, contentious projects can cause career stagnation. Fight for your own career development, do not rely on mentorship, direction or guidance from your manager.

Risposta di FreshBooks

Thanks for sharing your insights. Please also share your feedback via our Census Survey which is happening right now, it’s a key internal tool our team uses to gather perspective and data so we can collectively & continually improve FreshBooks. FreshBooks has a huge mission: to reshape the world for self-employed professionals. With such a grand mandate, we do have a number of Product Development teams working on different projects. If you, or anyone else, feels like you’re on the wrong team, please review this with your Manager or any of our leaders including Mike. Perhaps our leadership team needs to better explain the importance of the work each team is doing, or perhaps we need to find a much better fit for your interests. It’s an exciting time at FreshBooks and we’re certainly in the midst of change. We’re at the tail end of rebuilding our product & migrating users to the new platform. Some of the processes you’ve referred to may have worked well when rebuilding the product but won’t carry us forward into the next new phase of innovation. A number of teams are experimenting with new ways of working to meet the new needs of a relaunched platform. We’ve also revitalized the mission and mandate for teams to accelerate delivering extraordinary experiences to our customers. One of our recent themes has been Emergent Leadership. Future product innovation relies on leadership and ideas throughout FreshBooks. We’ve launched Innovation Days to provide more space to experiment and the presentations we’ve seen are showing extraordinary customer experiences. Together with an ambitious technical roadmap we expect many more extraordinary experiences in the future. As we enter a new phase of development, we’ve also expanded our Product Development leadership team with promotions and new hires – this represents a tremendous amount of years of experience at industry-leading companies around the world. Some of our new leadership are still very new in their roles and we hope you’ll give them a chance to settle in and make a positive impact. Our Product Development team is so well positioned for greatness right now! Some FreshBooks veterans have moved on to other career opportunities. Many began at FreshBooks, new to their careers in Product Development 5+ years ago. FreshBooks was a great place for them to learn and grow. We’re sad to see some of our friends move on but thrilled for them and equally proud that FreshBooks provided the environment for them to flourish. We’re committed to keeping FreshBooks a place where talent has the opportunity to blossom. We deeply value an open and inclusive workplace where we can all express a variety of viewpoints and come together to produce extraordinary experiences for our customers. That means constantly striving to be better. Thanks again for sharing your feedback.

Dramatic negative shift in the past year - Recensione dipendente - Full Stack Developer presso FreshBooks

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