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Good experience as a first job, but poor compensation outlook

Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Asana for 2 years
September 9, 2018
San Francisco, California
3.0
Doesn't RecommendPositive OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros

Very friendly and helpful peers and managers.

Excellent experience learning to do software engineering work at a place with good engineering standards.

Really talented engineers.

Customers love the product.

Decently interesting technical challenges.

Work-life balance is good, although not as good as places where there just isn’t enough work to do (e.g., LinkedIn or some teams at Google).

Cons

Compensation is way below market, especially for experienced engineers. They have an unrealistic view of market comp, which means you will get limited raises and no refreshers until your initial grant finishes vesting.

Product-oriented org means there is a lot of red tape for engineers to ship new features unless they have already been approved by the product people.

Lots of tech debt.

Although the culture is above average, the constant patting on the back about how great the Asana culture is tends to get grating. We don’t need to keep hearing how awesome our culture is – let’s work on making it better.

Lack of clarity regarding advancement due to lack of levels, and regarding getting approval due to lack of clear hierarchy.

Advice to Management

Dramatically increase compensation, at least for engineers, probably by giving out large refreshers.

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