Vantaggi
I joined Slack as a Senior Software Engineer working on mobile in late 2014 when there were about 70 employees. Now, 2.5 years later, there are over 700 (maybe even 800?). Scaling a company that rapidly is chaotic and challenging, but having worked at other places who came out of that process with a bad culture and poor management, I continue to be impressed with the thoughtful way Slack management has scaled the company. Not every decision that's been made has been correct, but my experience has been that management is very open to feedback and willing to iterate on processes or change them completely when we can see that they aren't working. One thing we are known for outside the company is diversity & inclusion, and my personal experience has been very positive in that regard, though as a white woman my perspective is limited. We do compensation audits and adjustments every 6 months, both market rate adjustments as well as performance based raises, and I've been very happy with that process. Hard to be mad about getting a raise every 6 months without having to ask for it. The work life balance has been in my experience excellent. On the walls it says "work hard and go home" and throughout the 4 managers I've had in my time here I have never felt pressured to work late or work weekends to meet a deadline. We've responded to missed deadlines with retrospectives about our planning and estimation process, rather than blaming engineers or anyone else. There's a lot more I could talk about, but I hope this is a helpful glimpse into what it's like working here. My experience isn't universal, and as an earlier employee I probably have some measure of privilege that I can't see clearly at the moment, but I see myself here for years to come and can't imagine leaving unless there are dramatic changes in management (like if Stewart and Cal left).
Svantaggi
Because of how fast we have been growing, it can get a little chaotic sometimes. There have been projects that have been 95% complete and then changed by management at the last moment, causing frustration and extra work for engineers. We are still learning how to most effectively communicate at this scale. There can sometimes be a tendency to be self-congratulatory for how, compared to other tech companies, we are more diverse etc. This is called out pretty rapidly when it happens, as it should be because we have a lot of work to do still. As management has said before internally, Slack Is A Distracting Menace. Working at a company full of Slack power users means that it can be hard to get work done without developing excellent focus skills.
