Pros: Culture is one of the hardest things to get right, and Benchling has hit so much of it on the head. The first thing I'm consistently impressed by is how much people genuinely care about the mission. Not just raising money or becoming profitable, but transforming the way life science research is done, and thereby contributing to better medicine at a lower cost. Many of the employees, including both of the founders, came from biology research, where they saw first-hand the many problems plaguing the field. Some other aspects of culture that stand out: * An incredibly high degree of thoughtfulness (this comes through in ad-hoc discussions, company all-hands, and a multiple-day company retreat we do every year). * Tight-knit team: We have a culture of doing frequent 1:1s with people across the company. I have 7 recurring 1:1s, and frequently spontaneously ask others as well. * Nearly all the feedback I've given has been genuinely listened to and appreciated. * It is okay to admit mistakes and failures, and leadership regularly sets an example. For the work itself: I work as a software engineer, and the work is extremely interesting. As someone who doesn't have a background in biology, I'm relishing the opportunity to learn how the field operates. Not only do I pick this up from talking with PMs and sitting in on customer calls, I've also gotten to collaborate significantly with designers and even marketing. My days are 9:30-6:30, and I've only been asked to work overtime once or twice a year. I couldn't ask for a better place to work. And if I could, I'd be confident that we would work together to address my feedback.

Cons: The main con, which everyone is aware of, is the average lack of experience across the team, especially in engineering and leadership. One of the ways this comes out is that a lot of the learning comes from peers and on the job, rather than through more developed career growth paths. Compounding this problem, many of the early employees bear a lot of responsibilities that they ideally wouldn't in order to focus on higher-leverage activities. As to what we're doing about it, we're currently hiring especially for experienced leadership, and the founders estimate that up to a third of their time is spent on that because it's so important. For example, these leadership positions include VP of Engineering, VP of Sales, and Head of People Operations, in addition to a number of front-line positions.

Pros: The biggest pro for Benchling is the quality of the people that work here. Benchling tries to optimize for people skills as well as technical skills when hiring engineers, and it really shows in day-to-day interactions with the team. I'm consistently learning from people through technical designs, leadership qualities, and empathy to users and coworkers alike. Benchling's application services a highly sophisticated user base - lab scientists and administrators. I personally get a lot of joy building tech that works really closely with science. Even though we don't have any requirements to have a scientific background to be an engineer here, we get to work alongside scientific experts within Benchling to build features that serve highly complex workflows within biology and chemistry. Moreover, we get to learn from our coworkers with scientific backgrounds via monthly lectures and product council feedback. Lastly, I'd mention that Benchling has a positive impact via the mission of the company. Bringing 21st-century tooling to scientists meaningfully helps to improve collaboration and productivity, which, in turn, helps to increase the speed at which our customers can deliver really impactful products. While there are a lot of places in tech that you can solve interesting technical problems in service of goals that don't help society, I've found that Benchling is one of the companies that is able to straddle interesting problems with a positive impact.

Cons: Benchling is a fast-growing company, and as such, there are some growing pains of figuring out what tooling, processes, and architectures worked well for a smaller team, but need to be improved for an increasingly large engineering organization. I've been happy that leadership acknowledges and invests here, but we have and will continue to run into challenges where we need to invest more in developer productivity than a comparable company that is not going through hypergrowth.

Pros: innovative, leadership principles, compensation, culture

Cons: deadlines, transparency, teamwork, management, workplace