Pros
LightStep is an amazing workplace. Everyone is kind, smart, motivated and humble. We're doing really interesting work in a new space of observability/APM -- and our work sets the bar in many areas! The engineers are consistently exceptional, with deep knowledge in their specialities and an impressive ability to teach through our biweekly lunch-and-learns, pairing and other kinds of talks. We're involved in product prioritization and scoping, our estimates are respected(!). We have great infrastructure in place to support shipping code. The engineering culture is also *very* remote friendly. From my experience as an engineer, I've seen that our sales, support and marketing departments are equally exceptional. They maintain strong relationships with our customers, and this translates to better product delivery via UX studies with key users, timely+prioritized feature requests / bug reports. Our engineering deliveries are communicated very well so we can measure usage and prioritize future work. And we have impressive and interesting customers thanks to these departments. As a company, we have a great culture of work-life balance, employee appreciation and management concern for workload/burnout. Our three cofounders (incl CTO and CEO) are all approachable, considerate and know the 'right' level of involvement in our work. We're often happily surprised by executives thanking us for work we didn't know they knew about. Benefits are great, and People Ops are helpful and approachable. Time off is available and respected. Family circumstances of all kinds are accommodated generously. Our new parent leave is one of the best I've seen. Our health insurance/etc are also awesome, plus nice perk stipends like $200/mo for gym membership and $50/mo for a cell phone. We also get nice gifts at various times like Pride gift bags + hoodie, May mental health month events and gifts. Remote employees missing SF HQ events get extra gifts in place of the events(!). Working at LightStep is supportive, pleasant and fun thanks to great colleagues, managers and executives. Our work is rewarding and challenging (in a good way). Everyone is treated very well.
Cons
We're in the middle of changes in our design department. We're short on designers. (Designers, please apply and join us!) Project scoping/planning takes a little longer than expected due to designer time constraints, and engineers make more changes without designer feedback (that said, product managers and engineer SMEs are very available!). We've have had some confusion in medium-term goals and direction (3-6 weeks out). We do very well with short-term and long-term product goals and direction. However, there is medium-term friction as we make big long-term changes without wanting to disrupt current, short-term work. This can make planning and scheduling more complex, raising many questions. We have many opportunities to ask for clarification from approachable managers and executives (weekly all hands Q&A, department meeting Q&A, CEO ask-me-anything, Slack DM and Slack channels for this kind of discussion). So it's fine and very manageable.