Ventajas
As I read some of the very negative reviews of the company, I feel that they don't give a fair and accurate reflection of the company and the culture that I know. Stack Overflow is far from perfect, but one of the driving factors for a lot of the negativity you see here is that the company has been through a tremendous amount of upheaval over the last four years. I have found it to be a place with amazingly smart coworkers, and I have been able to grow my career here. Traditionally, it had a quirky and fun culture, where employees had a great deal of autonomy (although this culture is changing). Here are the strengths: 1. Our software developers (and our employees in general). Some of the smartest, kindest, most interesting and helpful people you could ever work with. You will see some negative things about our engineers here on Glassdoor, but here is what it stems from: Engineering under our previous CEO Joel Spolsky was the most powerful department in the company and for better and for worse, they had an outsized influence over all decisions that the company made. Over the last couple of years as our leadership team has completely changed, they have been relegated to a more traditional role (for better and for worse), which has been a factor in a lot of talented, long-term developers leaving. 2. Our new leadership team (also a con). Between 2017 and now, the entire leadership team has turned over - CEO, CFO, CTO, CMO, Product, Customer Support, Community, HR -- literally every function in the company. So, Stack Overflow is a completely different company vs. what it was a few years ago. The new regime is corporate and process driven (a jarring departure from the old guard), but they are forcing the company to grow up and be accountable for results. 3. Finances. Due to new leadership, we have become a company that is laser-focused on revenue and financial performance. That has produced a significant financial result: we recently raised $85 million in venture funding, no small feat for a 12-year-old tech company. Between the fall of 2017, when the company had a large layoff, and the tech raise this summer, a pall of financial uncertainty hung over the company. This resulted in more significant cuts in Q1 and Q2 2020, where a significant number of employees (with Sales and Marketing being the hardest hit) were furloughed and then later laid off permanently. For those of us who are left, getting that venture capital allows us all to breathe a huge sigh of relief, knowing that our jobs are safe, at least for a while. And it has made it possible for the company to begin the hiring spree that is currently under way. 4. Generous benefits. Fully paid medical care. And I mean fully paid: no insurance premiums, copays, prescription drug costs, etc. 5. Remote friendly. Before the pandemic, SO was about 40% remote. Now we are 100% remote until summer 2021. 6. An opportunity to grow and expand your career in new ways. There isn't a clear path to going from an individual contributor to senior leadership (since 7 of the 9 senior leadership roles were hired from the outside), but there is a precedent for individual contributors to move around and try out new roles. Some examples: a researcher who became a software developer, interns who became full-time developers, a marketer who became a product manager, a community manager who is now an HR recruiter. In the Product org, three former product manager individual contributors were promoted to directors/people managers.
Desventajas
1. Mission of the company. The company has changed from a developer-first mindset ("let's build the greatest Q&A platform to help the world's software developers level-up their skills and then somehow figure out how to make money") to a money-first mindset ("let's leverage the Stack Overflow brand name and web traffic to become a high-growth SaaS company while still paying lip-service to being developer-focused"). This caused some employees to become disillusioned and leave. 2. New leadership team. The new team can come across as corporate automatons who don't value the contributions of long-term employees. This almost caused me to leave. Recently, I've come to accept that they are not better or worse, just different. Before, we had a management team that was inexperienced, promoted from within and sometimes chaotic -- but people with great heart, an adventurous spirit, and an ambitious, mission-centered view of what the company could be. The new team is more traditional, hierarchical and top down -- a lot less fun, a lot less caring, somewhat indifferent to Stack Overflow's culture and traditions, but better able to drive business results. 3. Morale has been in the toilet across all departments for the last few years due to all the above-mentioned upheaval. I feel that we have turned a corner and people are starting to feel more hopeful. The company conducts weekly employee morale surveys (through a company called OfficeVibe), and the numbers overall have gone up. Attrition has also slowed from a flood to a trickle, but hard to gauge whether that's because people are happier or just unable to make a move in the pandemic job market. 4. Cracks in our armor. Stack Overflow was and still is, THE place where developers can find answers to their software questions. But in the process, we have created a 12-year-old site where rude, condescending comments are common place and a small group of power users resists any and all attempts to change the site in meaningful ways. Worse, we have created an us-against-them mentality with these power users (who moderate and contribute to our sites for free). We did this by neglecting the upkeep of our Q&A sites (since most of our internal focus is on our paid products), dismissing and publicly humiliating one of our most visible moderators (who we had to pay restitution to), and literally telling these power users that their voices don't matter. Thanks in part to the leadership of our new CTO, we have been trying to right our wrongs, make amends and rebuild our relationship with our power users, but significant damage was done. If an alternative to Stack Overflow emerges and/or Google changes its search algorithm, I fear our dominance would be in jeopardy.
