Pros: Braze serves a critical use case for a wide variety of customers. Many of your favorite companies use Braze.It is nice to work in a system where high throughput and reliability are core concerns for customers, not just the engineers.

Cons: The work-life balance has headed downhill. Low level managers are burnt out and are not able to have focused goals. Both ICs as well as low level managers are working much harder for lower pay. As a result execution suffers. I expect attrition to follow. Second, in the name of “compliance” we are not allowed to do automated deployments anymore. Previously deployments used to be flawless, nowadays there’s a human error in our manual deployments almost every week. The tradeoff that the higher levels of management made here - removing automated deployments in the name of “compliance” boggles my mind and reduces trust in the decision making. Finally, there are limited channels to share feedback like this with management. We get comments like this “that’s not very productive”.

Pros: Having worked at Braze for many years, I am constantly in awe of what a caring, engaged, and intelligent group of people we work with. Beautiful people are thriving, doing quality work building up the company, each other, and ourselves in an environment where we’re respected and valued - across every role and office, from the CEO (hi bill) to the employee managing the mailroom (what’s up obby) and everybody in between. What’s most amazed me is how any time I experience any inevitable friction with a coworker, it is always handled in such a compassionate way, honoring each of our individual truths while also getting to the shared truth between us and finding practical and productive next steps. Everywhere you turn in this company you will find a rich and open heart with a sharp and solid mind attached, across sales, marketing, success, support, growth, legal, finance, facilities, people, product, and engineering. Pre-COVID, and I’m sure some day soon again, our offices were pleasant and comfortable spaces with catered lunches, snacks, and drinks on tap, across offices in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, and Chicago. Since COVID, the company has been so compassionate and flexible to each person’s individual needs as we’ve all navigated this year. I have had a few new coworkers join my team personally, and while I can’t wait to be able to raise a glass to them in person, I feel I know them as teammates and that we work together every day far more strongly than I would have expected possible from a purely virtual experience. Nothing can replace the lively social atmosphere that pervaded our offices pre-pandemic, but the company has done good work to keep us all connected with regular virtual social and wellness events. The product and client list speak for themselves, as do the desiccated husks of companies that seemed like competitors a few years ago. The growth curve of the business is just ridiculous and that’s about all I’ll say about that here. The future is bright.

Cons: Being part of a fast-growing company carries with it a lot of change. Processes and people are evolving rapidly, and areas of responsibility may move or grow over time and tracking it can be difficult.

Pros: The offices are good. Company events are ok.

Cons: Braze is an average company with low pay and enough middle managers to run a government. Marketing moves faster than the product. I've seen talented people leave because they're sick of the political circus or answering to managers who don't understand the work they're supposed to evaluate. Their AI initiatives over the past year haven't inspired much confidence. Generating images for slide decks is not the ceiling, managers. Plug in a few LLM agents into the platform is not innovation. Managers just don't seem to get it, you just need to know when is time to take a step aside. Can they still land clients? Sure. Inertia buys time. Would I bet on them surviving the next AI wave with this management? Absolutely not.