20 Oct 2020

Contractor culture at a startup

Recommend

CEO approval

Business outlook

Pros

- Office is nice, based out of Canton. - Engineering department has a lot of good-hearted people. - They paid my asking price, and didn't try to negotiate me down. - Provided a MacBook Pro with excellent specs. Cultural highlights (these may be pros to you, maybe not): - "Work hard play hard" culture centered around drinking. - Office foyer has a cardboard cutout of Ronnie the Limo Driver from the Howard Stern show.

Cons

- The CTO told me that the appropriate time to raise any feedback (outside of my directly assigned tickets) was 1x/month in an hourly tag-up with him. I was also informed I was not eligible for any changes to my role or responsibilities for at least six months (but this didn't count to them as a "probationary period"). - It was mandatory to record every hour of my 40 hour work week against a ticket in a time-sheet. (I was told this was standard across all engineering, and not a PIP.) That was to be my status report to the CTO, and it is how the company tracked engineering effort. I didn't know this was a requirement until I was already a month in. I asked what happens if I have an hour-long conversation with a coworker, and was told that I was supposed to log that to a ticket. - The Baltimore office is a small group of people. There were two departures from that group in my time there, and I didn't hear about them officially. There was no goodbye happy hour, no email, nothing. I found out about both by coincidence during happy hours, well after fact. - I suggested an engineering-wide discussion where we could talk about process and culture, about what being at a Series A startup meant to us, and what our vision for a department was. I proposed this in a 1:1 with the CEO, their response was that this would be perceived as "mutiny" and advised against doing that. Suffice it to say, this experience was not what I expected in coming on as a senior-level engineering hire at a Series A startup.

clean.io Response

Thank you for taking the time to leave us this feedback. It’s important for us to hear what we are doing well and what we need to improve on. I’m sorry you didn’t have a great experience during your time here. We’ll learn from this and hopefully we will keep getting better. As a fast growing startup, we are moving very quickly to build product while at the same time deliver world class results to our customers and create internal processes and structures to support our growth. It’s true that this environment isn’t for everyone, and that’s why we look to hire people who are tenacious and scrappy, and driven by great results rather than hierarchy or bureaucracy. One of our core values is integrity, which for us means being open and honest in your communications. You have done so here and so I will do my best to reply with the same mindset. We searched long and hard for the role that you were hired for. While I understand that after you got here there might have been other things that you realized you personally wanted to focus on, it wasn’t in the best interest of the team and the company to entertain your request to change your role within the first 60 days of your employment. We did however remain committed to entertaining your request after you had delivered what was required of you in the role you were hired to do after six months. I thought that was a reasonable timeframe for you to focus on the job at hand. Related to your comment on the feedback loop with your manager, as a fast growing startup, we are continuously looking for ways to improve communications and streamline the relationships that employees have with their managers. To that end, we’re currently in the process of rolling out a more structured framework for one on ones and employee performance reviews that I believe will provide every employee with regular opportunities for feedback. For the record, I would never discourage constructive conversations to make us better (the what) - I simply discouraged the path (the how) that you wanted to go down as I didn’t think it was the best way to drive positive change. Culture is extremely important to us and we’re very careful to hire people who are not just good at their jobs, but also a strong fit for the team. I’m happy to hear that you found this to be the case amongst your engineering team colleagues. We’re proud of the world class team that we’ve built here. We know that our team works hard, and it’s true that we encourage them to balance that out in ways that make work fun. We do like to have a good time here so that’s not something we see as a drawback. While that can be tough to do during a pandemic, we’ve focused on team building activities that can be done safely. Our recent golf outing received positive reviews from the team, and I’m looking forward to the virtual trivia night that we’re planning for next month. Thanks again for taking the time to leave this review, we wish you the best in your career. -Matt Gillis, CEO

1.0

10 Feb 2021

Toxic startup

Senior software engineer

Recommend

CEO approval

Business outlook

Pros

The pay is on par with the industry.

Cons

- Lack of integrity within the company. - Poor management of the engineering team. - Projects are lead by an external agency as to the company direction, I have no belief in the success of these directions. - Engineering leadership is driven from an external agency in Ukraine, expect to be doing menial admin tasks if you join from anywhere else. - Very few traditional engineering practices are used, be that from Waterfall or Agile camps. - Many tasks are over engineered with little to no documentation or knowledge sharing. For example: The business has let the agency invent an overly complicated testing framework for basic integration tests. The agency has also invented a language when some JS functions would suffice. - Bullying is rife within the engineering teams. Consistent moving of goalposts to have the team leads agenda. Repeated mocking of staff in meetings and inconsistent meeting structures with no clear roadmap. - The repeated outcry of "it's a startup" to defend that everything is poorly managed and their abhorrent practices. - Despite repeated complaints to upper management, nothing has been done to resolve the toxic culture within engineering. - "Bro startup" culture, enjoy finding any concrete diversity within teams.

clean.io Response

Thanks for taking the time to write this review. The last year has been incredibly challenging to say the least. My primary goal as the leader of this company is to create an environment where the best talent can come together and work collaboratively (from wherever you are) to solve big challenging problems. While we strive to get it right every time, and clearly we missed the mark with your experience here. I am genuinely disappointed that you didn’t enjoy your time here, but I really do appreciate your honest feedback as it can only help us get better.

5.0

12 Oct 2020

Great Team, Great Culture, Huge Potential

Director, operations

Recommend

CEO approval

Business outlook

Pros

The team here at clean is some of the brightest and best in the business. They all are working towards a common goal and are always willing to lend a hand to all even if it is not their job. The company also has an inclusive culture for all affiliations and a team that ensures all feel welcome and values each day. The company works on innovation and values all employees feedback. This is a true company where you can interject your thoughts and opinions and shape the company for the future - whether you are low on the totem pole or high up.

Cons

The company is a start up and employees are asked to go above and beyond their normal job titles. Long hours and since the bad actors are always at work you could find yourself working some times over the weekend or at night. That said there is always a team of people along side you and the feeling of stopping the bad guys is very rewarding.

clean.io Response

Thanks so much for taking the time to leave feedback. As you rightly pointed out, we are still a startup and that means that everyone we hire - from our engineers to our leadership team - needs to have a "can do" attitude and be willing to jump in and help out where needed. This tracks with our company's core values of teamwork, persistent yet adaptable, and selflessness. That being said, we also take seriously the need for everyone to strike a healthy balance in their lives, so we're working hard to encourage our team members to take time off when needed. As we grow, this commitment to balance will remain a top priority for us.

clean.io

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