9 Apr 2018
Anonymous employee
Embark.com Response
8yI'm sorry this employee had a poor experience. I saw and see a lot of potential in this person but our team culture wasn’t a good fit. This employee’s observations about the company culture are absolutely correct:
1) Work preferences and responsibilities
Responsibilities at Embark are defined broadly and are quite fluid, so the topic an Embark team member is working on is likely to evolve from one month to the next. We also do a lot of cross-training. Business people learn the basics of coding, and engineers sometimes join client calls; the calls help build engineers’ empathy and understanding of client needs while working on features. This could be a great experience for people who like to be learning new things outside their comfort zone (which is my own personal preference that I think the review refers to). Unfortunately, this could also be deeply frustrating for someone who likes to come to work with a predictable set of work responsibilities.
2) Work-life balance
Our general hours together at the office are 9-6pm but, as with many tech start-ups, it's not unusual for our team to be responsive to urgent client needs outside of those hours or if we’re making a push to hit a key milestone.
3) Salaries
Our salaries are on the high end of education technology, but they are well below compensation in other sectors, such as financial services. Without a doubt, all of our staff could be making more money elsewhere than they do here. We usually start the interview process by asking candidates why they would want to join us (typically it's some combination of the mission, the learning opportunity, and/or equity upside) when they could be receiving higher short-term compensation by making a different career choice.
This employee’s manager and I did our best to check in regularly to see how this person was doing and, at multiple points, we provided the option of helping this person land a new role if our culture was not a good fit. I received multiple thank you notes from this employee for investing my personal coaching time -- it’s too bad that the coaching sessions turned out to have been the low point of this person’s experience! I think our management team learned a lot from the experience about how to assess fit, and we’ve had subsequent hires who’ve worked out really well. We’ve also placed increasing emphasis on candidates who have been successful in similar environments.