Pros
First, the people. The people I work with every day are extremely bright, motivated, and friendly. From my first day as a software engineer, I felt embraced by my team and department. Working across the organization, I consistently encounter people who are curious and open to ideas and input. I have not experienced a single interaction where I felt like my feedback or ideas were unwelcome. Second, the culture. Not just the culture we have, but also the culture we are trying to build. In the technology department, new ideas are embraced. We did a hack-a-thon last summer, and 4-5 of the projects built by our teams are either currently in production or under active development. We follow a continuous improvement model in our processes and practices. In the year I have been here, we have started doing trunk-based development to reduce our lead times, moved our source control system to support better delivery automation, completely modernized our front-end CD pipeline, and much more. Every week, a member of the technology organization gives a presentation on an idea, technology, or practice that we want to adopt or use more broadly. We promote from within. Most of the team leads at Filevine were promoted from within. At least half of our Product Owners grew from other positions in the organization. Four of the five members of my original team have been promoted into new positions as the company has grown. The fifth was promoted right before I joined the company. I was also a beneficiary of this practice after 9 months as a software engineer. In my opinion, hiring internally demonstrates conclusively that an organization values its people. Additionally, technology leadership is focused on creating a good work/life balance and making sure people are happy and feel that their work is meaningful. I have been in many meetings where my Vice President says "it's okay to slow down" or "we need to set an example to others by taking time off so they know it is ok to take time off too". Third, the work. We have very fun and interesting problems to solve from a technology perspective. With the rate of growth we have been experiencing, we are challenged to create new patterns and capabilities as we scale. I have recommended many friends to work at Filevine and several have started working here.
Cons
Filevine is not perfect. As you can infer from my Pros, we recognize and are actively working on areas where we can improve. I think there are some people who are great employees who don't get enough recognition. This is not unique to Filevine. People who quietly go about their business day in and day out without communicating their story are easy to miss. Furthermore, if their immediate leader does not notice and show appreciation, it is likely that higher levels of leadership will not be aware of the great work done by that individual. One of the things we have been doing to better recognize our quiet star players is to give each team member an allotment of SwagBucks that they can award to other team members in recognition of good work. Since leaders are not part of every conversation and collaboration, this allows the people who are closest to the work to show their appreciation for each other. As leaders, we watch for trends and also focus on ways to recognize people who are not being recognized. Another challenge we face is helping people on distributed teams feel like part of a larger whole. Since our entire team is remote, and since the organization is growing so quickly, it is hard for people to meet and get to know everyone. We are trying to address this using lunchtime gaming sessions, tech talks, weekly Zoom happy hour, bi-annual hack-a-thons, interest and hobby-based Slack channels, cross-team groups for different software development disciplines, and weekly demo days.
