Atlassian

Psychological safety is very important. People feel free to speak their minds even if it goes against project goals. You're encouraged to not save anything for yourself, and you don't have anything to be afraid of. People will hear your arguments!

People really hold the company's values to heart, and I think they are one of the great culture-defining things the company has.

Employee wellness feels like a top priority. Work-life balance, for me at least, has been great, and I feel free to regulate it as long as work is getting done.

For me, I have never seen a blame game take place. If there is a problem, people only try to understand it to prevent it, not to find someone to blame.

Through these challenging times (cliché much?), the thought Atlassian has been putting towards employees is truly heartwarming. I'm proud to work here.

Work is technically engaging. You work with smart people, and you're exposed to excellence quite often. You will learn stuff here.

Promotions are a HUGE con for me. As someone not interested in bureaucracy, I'm fortunate to be in a place in my life where I'm not in need of the extra responsibility & money attached to a promotion to the next level. Even though I fully believe I'd be qualified for the next position, the process to prove it is so grueling and cumbersome that I feel I'll never even want to partake in it. It will definitely be easier to look for a new job than to get promoted here.

This gets brought up in every engineering all-hands, and the answer is always the same with different words. To paraphrase, the answer is always something like: "Yeah, I hear you, but we need to keep quality, and we believe it's fine like this, so nothing's gonna change." At least they are transparent about it.

To get promoted, you have to build a paper trail (evidence, links, dates, testimonies, Slack conversations, Zoom recordings, pull request links, etc.) of performing at the next level for a whole year. It's always a fight, but if you ace the interview, you can still get hired into that level for one witty afternoon. I honestly feel that the paperwork for visas is way easier than this. I think although the need to keep the bar high is 100% true, there must be a better way.

The company would be a 5-star from me if this was not an issue. If there was a 3.5-star option, I'd give it that (hence 4 stars) because when I learned this was the process, it broke my spirit and my drive to move up the ladder here.

On the other hand, if you are someone that navigates office politics well, you'll not suffer this much, I reckon.

Look into the promotion process. Honestly, this has been suggested internally so much to so little avail that I believe this will take years to change, if ever. For all else, from my point of view, keep it up.