Asana

9 years into my professional career, I'm very happy to be at Asana. My time here has been great for my career and compensation. I'm going to try to give a very pragmatic overview of the subjective experience of a relatively senior software engineer without salesmanship.

I think we're focusing on more or less the right things and succeeding in a lucrative market. Success hides problems, and fortunately we have a lot of success.

I trust my coworkers and leadership to make pretty good decisions. I've seen very little dead weight, and most people seem to be effective at their jobs. The average engineer here is definitely a cut above my past experiences. I don't notice very many boneheaded decisions. There's a paper trail for most things.

As a product, Asana doesn't suck, which is more than I can say for every other project management tool I've had the misfortune of using. The whole org buys into it as much as possible, which turns a whole class of collaboration problems into non-issues. Literally none of my coworkers have ever sent me an email. Using Asana day-to-day at a fully committed organization is a massive benefit.

People seem to be given responsibility if they've demonstrated the ability to handle it, rather than being held back for arbitrary reasons. I can think of specific cases where this didn't happen, but on the whole it has been true. On the same note, it's possible to create a customized role for yourself if you make enough noise and justify it with business goals. You won't be stuck in the role you were hired into.

The financial promises made by leadership when I joined have been extremely accurate. It's been a very nice change from getting repeatedly burned on stock options.

Turnover among my immediate coworkers has been very low, and as a result we've been able to develop a close, comfortable, highly effective working relationship. If there is a people problem, we lean on each other for support. I've given and received a lot of feedback, and feedback from coworkers in our formal review cycles has been very high quality.

The only reason I would quit at this point would be because Asana stops doing work that interests me, or if someone gives me a truly irresponsible amount of money. Given our success and the mountain of technical hurdles we still have to climb, neither of those things is likely to happen any time soon.

After 3 years, I do have many criticisms despite my 5-star rating. I don't believe a perfect workplace exists, and good leadership is challenging. These are issues that I advocate for internally, and I don't feel discouraged from pushing back.

Asana is trying to do too many things at once. We understaff critical teams or staff them with engineers lacking experience in key areas. In other words, Asana acts like a normal software company in this way.

Asana's handling of COVID-19 has been great compared to most American corporations, but disappointing compared to my hopes. Specifically, I don't think we've tried to lighten our workload to reduce burnout. Instead, we're just barreling forward at the same pace as before. If we're pumping the brakes, it's because people just cannot keep up the pace, rather than it being a deliberate choice. I'm also grateful for, yet unimpressed by, our modest work-from-home budget when I'm dedicating 20% of my living space to working for this company.

There have been a handful of bad hires in management in the past couple of years, which were dealt with appropriately, but it would have been better to have not made the mistake.

Asana made some extremely strange technology choices early in its life that are having massive effects on engineering effectiveness today with mixed results. The code is very consistent, but it can take a lot of steps to get things done, and the build environment is slow.

Dustin and JR, the founders, own a majority (or near majority) of the stock, so in a very material way, the company is controlled by a pair of benevolent rich people. Depending on your perspective, this could be a good or bad thing. This arrangement seems to cut out a lot of BS, but it makes me uncomfortable. Better than being controlled by hedge funds, I guess.

Company-wide communication, especially about policy changes, often comes across as patronizing. Similarly, I am not a person who responds well to ra-ra company cheerleading, and we do a lot of that.

Asana's relationship with remote work is contradictory and inconsistent despite recent attempts to "clarify." We simultaneously say:

• Asana helps remote workers succeed.
• Asana will remain an in-person workplace.
• Remote teams don't work well and therefore we don't have them (this is false; we do and will continue to have them).
• Specific individuals may go fully remote if they meet a very high bar. I see Asana's behavior as gaslighting its remote-first teams and missing opportunities for great remote hires.

Despite our efforts at diversity and inclusion, our raw numbers haven't really changed.

Recognize and embrace that you have effective remote engineering teams.

Address COVID WFH burnout by giving teams explicit room to breathe in their timelines rather than telling us to do breathing and mindfulness exercises.