Pros
- Great office location, close to all kinds of public transportation. Unbeatable view from the rooftop. The building staff is really nice and makes everyone feel welcome. Catered lunch every day, food is fairly decent. No shortage of snacks and drinks in the kitchens. There are some beginning efforts for building strong engineering forums.
Cons
- Squarespace Engineering is still struggling to figure out some of its key parts, which is a pretty big red flag considering the age of the company. Don’t expect anything said in the interview process to actually hold up once the job starts. Before taking the job, I was told by multiple people that Squarespace prided itself on having a flat career ladder without official titles. Coming from a similar organization, I knew this worked for me. Less than a month after I started, they introduced a poorly-explained career ladder with an astounding number of tiers. Although the ladder was somehow tied to compensation, this was never explained. The team I was placed onto did not allow me to apply much of what I had worked on before, nor did it resemble the kinds of questions I had been asked in interviews. This was a surprise for me, as I expressed wanting to continue doing the same kind of work I had been doing to multiple people. It was also a far cry from what I felt had been sold to me by my recruiter. The benefit for Squarespace was that they could place me on an insultingly low tier on the career ladder that ignored my years of experience because the responsibilities of my team were new to me. The review schedule meant that it would take well over a year for me to possibly move up to a place on the ladder that would start to match where I had been at the job I just left. When I brought up my concerns with team placement, the best they could do was shrug their shoulders and say that they were new to having teams. That is a very tough pill to swallow for someone who left an entire life behind to move across the country to take a job. NYC snobbery is at its absolute worst at Squarespace. After living in cities for nearly a decade, I decided to start out in the suburbs when I moved for them. No matter who it was and whether it was their business or not, anyone who found this out reacted as if my choices were awful and that I didn’t belong with the rest of them. Ultimately, the gatekeeping has made me strongly reconsider whether the greater NYC area is the right place for me. Recruiting sold me on Squarespace having flexible work hours. What this really means is that most of engineering starts to roll in at 11:30 AM. I chose to work something closer than 8:30-5:15 so that I could still have hours left in the day when I got home. It was strongly implied by multiple people (again, whether or not it was their business) that I was having trouble adjusting to my team because our hours didn’t match. Nobody thought to address the real problem, which was that it’s impossible to schedule anything before 12pm without protest. The lack of discipline made it feel less like work and more like summer camp. The entire experience was one I was glad to rid myself by pursuing another opportunity as soon as I could. Be careful of what they tell you- it probably won’t come true.