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Wonderful people, problematic DevOps / SRE systems

Production Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Airtable for 2 years
July 19, 2022
3.0
Pros

The interpersonal culture was fantastic: everyone was considerate, and the company had some excellent initiatives during the pandemic.

The executives communicated regularly.

Cons

I feel they were going through growing pains. Practices that work in a 10-person startup rarely scale to 1000 people, and Airtable had more than a few of those.

As an SRE / DevOps / Production Engineer, their deployment stack was idiosyncratic, and it seems the senior engineers wanted it to stay that way.

Additionally, they did not offer any formal compensation for going on-call outside business hours.

Advice to Management

Allow engineers to have some say over how they accomplish their assigned tasks. Being told "do it like XXXX" and then not being able to keep up with XXXX because of their experience/depth in the language and technology stack was the very opposite of encouraging.

Additionally, review your internal standards, style guides, and languages and verify whether they still make sense now that you have 1k employees with multiple dedicated security, analytics, and production engineering teams.

Additional Ratings

Work/Life Balance
2.0
Culture and Values
5.0
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
5.0
Career Opportunities
4.0
Compensation and Benefits
2.0
Senior Management
4.0

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