Pros: Huge impact: Much of lab biology is still done on paper or in legacy software, and bringing it onto a modern system speeds up work by orders of magnitude. Our customers range from major pharma companies to small biotech startups to academic labs, and we have the potential to truly revolutionize the space. Nerdy culture: Most customer-facing roles, like sales and CX, require a biology background. Therefore, nearly everyone at Benchling is either an engineer or a scientist, which truly lends itself to a nerdy and scientifically-minded company culture. Openness: Transparency and collaboration are highly valued. There are regular AMAs with the executive team, and stopping by people's desks to ask questions is highly encouraged. Company trajectory: We've been in hypergrowth for a few years now, and it really looks like we are on a path to being a successful company in the long term. Inclusion and empathy: Everyone is generally kind, social, and empathetic. There is a focus on ensuring a comfortable work environment for people of all identities and backgrounds. We have affinity groups for BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and women that meet regularly and host company-wide outreach events.

Cons: Can be high-pressure: We sometimes work to tight deadlines, and a downside of doing high-impact work is that it is actually important to get it right. I've never been required to work weekends or long hours, but sometimes I have to in order to hit deadlines. Growing pains: We're in hypergrowth, and there's basically always at least one process that has not caught up to our size and is causing difficulties. We notice and resolve these relatively quickly, but by the time one is resolved, another one has arisen just because we are growing so quickly. Pandemic WFH is getting old, but that's true in all software jobs right now.

Pros: The eng team has become much more collaborative in the face of business challenges. Cool mission.

Cons: Revenue flagging since ZIRP ended. New plans to improve revenue will take a while to pay off. Let's see how things are going next year.

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.