Chegg

Work-life balance

• Almost all teams within Chegg are never asked to stretch beyond their work timings, which is usually 7-8 hours including meal and lunch breaks. Engineers are given flexibility to come late or leave early (provided you inform your peers or manager) as long as the work items don't suffer.
• Leaves are also approved with no questions asked, as long as everything is communicated on time. If you have an emergency, just inform the manager. If you can support the team during an emergency, it’s fine; otherwise, there is no pressure.
• This is most important for me because it means I have a life outside work.
• Focus is on getting the work done, and there is zero or very little micromanagement, depending on which team you're in.
• You have full flexibility to work on side projects and also switch to totally different teams like DevOps, Business Intelligence, and Design.

Employee benefits

• Chegg employees hold a good amount of company shares (~50-150% of the salary), and this is for all employees, not only engineers.
• Chegg stocks have performed well over the past 3 years and doubled in the last 4 months due to the Covid-19 outbreak.
• During the Covid outbreak, every single employee was given 20K to set up home infrastructure of their choice.
• You have an option to purchase stocks.
• Each employee has medical insurance that includes dependent parents as well.

Infrastructure

• Everyone has standing desks. I love it.
• The office is spacious with multiple breakout areas.
• Two 23” rotatable monitors for every workstation.
• Latest Macbook 15”
• You can request an additional keyboard, docking, cooling pad, mouse, and headphones with a mic.
• IT support is good when your machine is bricked or damaged. You get a replacement, no questions asked. Employees are trusted.

Tech & growth

• Chegg has been living with a legacy monolith PHP stack for a very long time, and efforts are being made to move to a cutting-edge stack (React/Apollo/Typescript and Java(Spring Boot)/NodeJS).
• When Chegg acquires any company, we inherit a new stack, and efforts are always made to standardize that too.
• You don't only work on business logic but on cloud infrastructure as well. There are DevOps and release management teams, but mostly they assist you and provide you with tools to set up infrastructure yourself.
• Learning is limitless, as we have multiple products, each having different challenges that require its own infrastructure.
• You have 30% reserved bandwidth to work on tech initiatives so that you always keep learning and never feel that product work is mundane and boring (it hardly gets boring, though).
• As you're free to switch teams (provided you meet certain conditions), you can learn anything by joining teams like Data Science, Data Engineering, Business Intelligence, DevOps, etc.
• You are always encouraged and appreciated when you contribute to OSS and write blogs. Innersource is a Chegg-wide initiative to adopt OSS methodologies in Chegg tech standards. Sometimes your core work also involves changing open-source projects.

People & Leadership

• We have some talented people both in Delhi and Santa Clara, and I have learned a lot from them. In Santa Clara, we have people joining us from Facebook, Medium, Amazon, Quora, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Netflix. Not a lot of people are from elite companies in Delhi, but we have folks from IITs.
• There are no blame games when something goes down in production. A proper retrospective is done, and human error is always taken into account. We take it as an opportunity to learn.
• All the managers I worked with were transparent and very cooperative.
• Talking about transparency, all project plans and leadership decisions for every team and at the organizational level are open to everyone and documented in one place.
• Workday is used to track all skills and individual feedback and performance so that if his/her manager leaves, all the hard work and reputation is not lost, and it's easier to onboard a new manager.

Autonomy

• Generally, you are given the freedom to solve things in your own way so that it maximizes learning, even though it takes a little longer.
• At a senior level, you also have the freedom to plan a project in your own way.
• The only thing that matters is on-time, quality work. Engineers are always consulted for timelines and estimation, except in very rare cases when there is a deadline set.

Training and education

• Chegg doesn’t spend any money on training platforms like LinkedIn Learning, Egghead, Udemy, Coursera, but the model is a bit different.
• Time to time, there are AWS trainings where you fill up your name, and you get free access to training resources for a limited time. You can re-request access if you were not able to finish the course.
• There is a company-wide initiative to educate people at all levels—devs, QE, product, and design—to get them training on accessibility, so access is provided to training resources.
• If you need access to subscription-based learning platforms, then you can work it out in your team or with peers by sharing the subscription.
• You have an educational component in your CTC where you can purchase any course and then submit its bill, and that amount will be tax-free.
• During the Covid-19 breakout, every employee has been given 20K per year to learn skills of their choice (related to their work).

Culture

• There are team outings and get-togethers. Birthday celebrations, celebrations of festivals, and annual celebrations.
• There are show-and-tell sessions and frontend-backend forums, which means you get to know people outside your team.
• Company all-hands meetings happen as and when required, multiple times during the year, where performers are rewarded as well.
• There is an annual cricket league within the company happening from the past 2 years.

Tech & Growth

• Most of the engineering leadership, both in terms of product and tech initiatives, is driven via Santa Clara. I feel the India office sometimes becomes a dumping ground for less important work (though that may not always be low-quality work and may or may not involve learning & growth).
• Some teams often complain that they don’t get time to work on tech initiatives.
• One of the reasons could be that India leadership reports to Santa Clara, and their growth depends on what they feel India engineering should be doing (which sometimes involves less important projects). If your manager has the spine to raise their voice against that, good. Otherwise, your passion might fade over a period of time working on tasks which don’t include new learning. Again, here you can work on global initiatives which are interesting enough and involve a lot of learning.
• Often, your growth depends on how good your impression is on people outside your team in Santa Clara.

Salary

• Annual salary growth is limited to an average of 10%. Though you will get growth in terms of stocks if you get a promotion.
• If you’re ambitious about money and really skilled, Chegg might not attract you.

Gender Diversity

• It’s not that good in Engineering. 1:10, I guess.

Hiring

• As of now, Chegg is hiring at a very fast pace. Initially, we had much better quality of engineers, but now we are hiring low-quality engineers.
• Standards for hiring have gone down, as Chegg is not paying a competitive salary. We are hiring from service-based firms with zero product experience. In the end, managers have all the right to not take someone into a team if you feel the candidate is not up to the mark.

HR / Admin / Accounts

• HR tools to manage employee tax, salaries, and leaves suck, and the team is often relying on manual tools to get the work done. Which means it's always a headache to work with them.

Leadership

• India leadership lacks autonomy, as they depend on Chegg US guidance. Most of the Chegg US policies are good, by the way.
• Some engineering managers are really not efficient in guiding you to grow and also not technically sound.
• Some teams don’t have any managers, so they are pretty much dependent on lead engineers who are not suitable for the role and lack people skills.

Hire good quality people who can take the organization to a new level. Pay them.

I think gradually all good people will leave with time, and they should be replaced by people of the same or higher quality.