Pros
- The engineering team: The engineers here are smart, they have balanced views, they're accepting and kind, they aim to do what's right for the whole team. We have great talent in this team. - Learning: I've learned a lot working at Gradle. We drive the tools we use pretty hard (we are a tools company, after all). You have the chance to learn about them more deeply than you might be able to at another company. - The product and the mission: Develocity is a great product. Working with it is excellent and that's another reason why I find DX here quite good. Making life more productive and more satisfying for developers, especially those in enterprises where Developer productivity can be so tough, is a great problem to be working on. - The engineering leadership: Etienne and Luke are great, we're lucky to have them. Growth in an engineering team is very difficult to manage well, and I think they've made some very good decisions between them, both organisational and technical. - Interaction with customers, without proxies: As an engineer at Gradle, depending on the team you work on, you will get the opportunity to interact directly with customers without proxies, to understand their needs and what they want. At many companies you don't get that, but here you do, and I think that's a great opportunity and makes for more rewarding work.
Cons
Everywhere has their own problems, and that includes Gradle. Here are some of the challenges we have that are unlikely to be solved in the immediate term as I write this: - Some aspects of the development lifecycle are still underdeveloped or suboptimal, such as the release process. Like everyone else, we have flaky tests and occasional build issues. We have a team dedicated to improving developer productivity and solving these sorts of issues. - The codebase is fairly complex, and it takes time to get used to working in it. This is standard fare at many engineering shops, especially ones that use a monorepo, as we do. - Many engineering organisations have this issue, we do too and I think I speak for all of us when I say we're not happy about it: The engineering team is not very diverse, demographically. I do think we are an inclusive and accepting team, and I hope that soon we're going to see that manifested in the makeup of the team, but right now it's not.
