Love it here - Web Developer Paper Leaf Employee Review

Thanks for taking time out of your day to leave a review. It’s important for us as a company to receive, listen to, and address feedback from all employees. I’m glad you feel that Paper Leaf is full of great people who are always trying to help. Those are the people we try to hire across the board, and I think we’ve done a good job at that too. However, I agree that we’re not perfect and yes, we have areas to improve on. To your points: > “crazy work overload of employees. There are too much work and it expected to be done very fast.” While I don’t think we’ve 100% nailed the formula, I do have to disagree with the framing of PL as somewhere with “crazy work overload”. In the first 6 months of this year, the average employee is on pace to bank 1.9 days / year. That would indicate that workload is reasonable. Further, we do our best to manage workload by having a work week under 35 hours, having employees lead the estimation of their own work for fairness and accuracy, and using a resource planner to ensure we’re only booking each person to 27 hours in a week (leaving a full day for unknowns and ad-hoc client requests). All that said, the system isn’t perfect and there are moments where we need to turn stuff around quickly, or estimates are off and work is lengthier to complete than anticipated. I hear you on that front. We’re constantly tracking this data and refining our process for accuracy, because believe me: we don’t want to work overtime for free any more than you do. Clients do expect us to deliver work at a good pace; it’s part of the expectation of being a high-performing digital product shop. However, most of our projects span 4-12 months, and we hit most deadlines with little overtime, so the data would say that we’re scoping fairly accurately from a macro sense. That said, I’m sorry you felt overworked; that is not the type of company I set out to create, so I’ll look again into our systems for areas to improve. > “not clear tasks with very short deadlines. So you will waste a lot of time just on trying to figure out what should be done. That leads to bad code and projects that are very hard to handle.” I agree that sometimes tasks and work requests that come from clients and project managers could use some increased clarity. It’s tough to nail that every time. Our project teams do their own discoveries and create their own user stories and associated work plans, but perhaps more coaching and oversight is required to ensure those work plans are understandable, feasible and not overly optimistic. I’ll look into this more. > “very hight expectations of the skill set you need to have. If you don't have you it you are expected to learn it in hours.” You’re right in that we do have high expectations here. It comes with the territory and aligns with our core values, and our clients’ expectations of us and the work we produce. I wouldn’t say we have unreasonable expectations, but there have definitely been moments where we’ve asked too much from a more entry-level employee or misjudged the skillset of someone we’ve hired. That’s on us. Thankfully, we’ve taken a few big strides in recent years to improve in these areas. In 2020 we rolled out job bands & levels which greatly clarified expectations between a Developer (Level 1) and a Developer (Level 5), which has helped us set clear and collaborative expectations with our team and also provide a clear track for progression and promotion within the company. We’ve also overhauled our new employee onboarding process, which is extended out over multiple months with a slow ramp up in work scope and complexity. These two particular items have been met with praise from both new and long-term employees. The next step for us is rolling out an improved PD plan – a strategic goal from our management team for this year based directly on employee feedback – which will allow for employees to learn more skills they’ll need down the road. > “get ready to handle 5-6 different projects during one day.” If you’re part of our Ongoing Solutions team, which is tasked with infrastructure and support for our ongoing clients, you can definitely touch 5-6 different products in one day. That work is smaller in scope, so there is naturally more volume and more ad-hoc requests. For our focused product teams, 5-6 projects in a day would be a sign of a prioritization issue to be addressed. Teams on larger projects largely have control over their weeks and days and how they structure their work, which they plan with their team in their weekly meeting and daily standups. Looking at our resource planner right now, our 3 product teams have an average of 3-4 staggered projects at any one time, of varying size & complexity. I would love to get this down to 2-3, which is a reasonable goal that we’ve been working towards by scaling project size so we can decrease project volume. > “prepare to work overtimes. Maybe it used to be different, but now work/life balance is not about PL. I know people who have been working 1 month without normal days off.” You’re right, sometimes overtime happens. Maybe the work was underscoped, maybe there were delays that caused a crunch at the end of the project – there’s a host of reasons why OT happens, but I agree: it isn’t great. That’s why we’ve designed the systems we have in place, mentioned above (re: employee work estimation, resource planning, shorter work week length, etc), to try our best to avoid this. Sometimes it still happens, and I’m sorry it happened to you. The data doesn’t show that working overtime is a problem – as indicated by the 1.9 days / year on average – but there could be some folks who are working overtime without speaking up about it or tracking that time for some reason. I appreciate you mentioning that; I’ll do some investigating. I’m sorry your time at Paper Leaf wasn’t up to your standards. I’ve always said I try to create the company I’d like to work for; I’ll keep striving for that and looking for areas to improve. 

Regards,
 
Jeff Archibald, 
Managing Director

Thanks for taking the time to review us. It’s important to hear what we’re doing well at Paper Leaf, and areas we need to improve on. We’re not perfect, but we do go to great measures to be a place people want to work and can advance their careers. I agree with you on a lot of your points: we do have great people, and our directors really do care (and not just the directors). I do want to address some of the critical feedback you provided as well. > Expected to deal with an unreasonable workload, and it's your fault when you can’t: I’m sorry the workload didn’t feel reasonable. Our value proposition does revolve around doing high-quality work at a fairly quick pace. We do our best to manage workload by having a work week under 35 hours, robust employee-led estimation to ensure our estimated workloads are made by the people doing the work, and using a resource planner to ensure we’re only booking each person to 27 hours in a week (leaving a full day for unknowns and ad-hoc client requests). Even with these processes, policies, and safeguards for workload in place, it isn’t a perfect system. Sometimes critical requests come in, sometimes grants have hard deadlines, and the like – all of which can lead to moments where workload is high. All I can say is: I hear what you’re saying, and we’ll keep trying to do better to strike that balance. > No opportunity to bank overtime: This is admittedly confusing to me, as the opportunity to bank overtime is also listed as a pro in your review (and it’s written in our policies; people do bank OT here at Paper Leaf, with a policy much more generous than is legislated by the Alberta government). Maybe this was a misunderstanding? For what it’s worth, in the first 6 months of this year, the average employee is on pace to bank 1.9 days / year. That would indicate that workload is reasonable and employees do take advantage of the opportunity to bank time (as they should). > Expected to pick up the slack when there's turnover with no additional support: I agree, it is challenging when people leave but work still needs to be done. It often ends up with a period of time where the departed employee’s work is spread across one or more people in the shop until that role is filled again. I’m sorry you didn’t feel supported by your team during those moments; we’ll strive to do a better job in that regard going forward. I will say that that hasn’t been my experience – I have covered multiple roles while backfilling them, have seen our team hire external contractors to help us deliver during an employee departure, and have only seen support amongst fellow teammates during mat leaves or turnover with regard to sharing the work. Thankfully, only 4 employees departed Paper Leaf over the entirety of 2021, so turnover isn’t a problem here. > No flexibility for project deadlines, yet people are annoyed when you need to work OT: The nature of our work is that, sometimes, launch dates are contractually bound (either by the client or by a funding source). That can mean that yes, some project deadlines are fixed, and if the work hasn’t been managed appropriately, there can be a crunch near project completion to get it all done. Banking OT does need to be managed by the company so as to be sustainable, but I agree with you in that there are improvements to be made with regard to flexible deadlines where appropriate, alongside project estimation and management. I would dispute that there is “no” flexibility for project deadlines, however, as we frequently extend launch dates at the request of clients for strategic timing or internal resourcing purposes, or if we’ve discovered additional work that needs to be addressed but cannot within the original project timeline. > Big talk about learning and growth, but no time to dedicate to it: I agree that PD education – in the form of formalized learning on company time – has been a challenge for us. It is one of our strategic goals this year, which came directly from employee feedback in our most recently quarterly survey. I’m proud of that feedback —> action relationship, and am confident we’ll improve in this particular branch of learning & growth. However, learning and growth isn’t solely about formal PD education: we collaboratively design and execute on Coaching Action Plans for all employees which revolve entirely around learning and growth; we send multiple employees to conferences and online learning each year; and we have seen numerous employees start as junior developers and progress through to senior roles or leading development teams at places like Shopify. To me, that shows learning and growth, but I do agree that more time for formalized PD education is an area for improvement. All in all, I’m sorry that your experience here wasn’t as good as it should have been. One of our core values is Progression, and that includes everything from skills and technology to employee satisfaction – so we’ll continue to improve.

 Regards,

 Jeff Archibald,
 Managing Director