Block

• The people. Lovely people to work with who are incredibly helpful. You often hear rhetoric at other companies like "we're disrupting and changing the world," but at Square, you'll find that people are more humble about the mission of economic empowerment, and people have full lives outside of Square.

• Product ownership is huge here. I feel like I get to weigh in on decisions for product and innovate on our products with new ideas.

• Engineering excellence. I worked at startups before this, where engineering was haphazard and unfocused. Here you learn how to build incredibly performant, secure products that integrate with a global payments stack.

• Career ladder is well-defined for software engineers. Clear paths for I.C.s vs. management roles, and my E.M.s have all been very receptive to my career goals.

• Perks are amazing. Free lunch and breakfast every day (I wish we still had free dinner) and lots of other freebies that are icing on the cake when picking a job.

• It's in the best location in S.F., in Mid-Market. Incredibly close to Hayes Valley, the Mission, Alamo Square, etc.

• Tension between having an ecosystem of products that are all working towards their own goals, while needing to collaborate with other teams where roadmaps were not aligned between teams.

• Company feels less transparent as we get bigger.

• Honestly, I wish we still had the free dinner perk. It made it really easy to not have to cook on a weeknight if I was working late. But it was overall really great that they canceled dinner service because I have a better work-life balance leaving work earlier instead of working later to get dinner.

I love management here. Jack has set this company up successfully, where he is not a bottleneck for decision-making, and the core leadership team is good at setting direction for the company.

Advice: I think wherever possible, the leadership team should follow Jack's example and not make themselves bottlenecks either, and keep pushing decision-making back down to the product teams.