Chime

Amazing product: The customers really love it. When I'm using my Chime card, I get a lot of unprompted, very positive feedback from people who would have no idea I work for Chime. For example, someone at a store might ask, "Do you love your Credit Builder card as much as I do?" when they see me using my bright green card.

Many very smart, very seasoned engineers: I've worked at several startups that had an official "no jerks" policy, but this is the first one where the great collaborators outnumber the jerks. There are a lot of senior engineers who are incredibly mature and really able to put egos aside to get stuff done, help each other out, etc.

Very fun place to work: COVID has made fun at work really challenging, but we have a ton of super engaging virtual events. The workplace team is amazing.

Work-life balance is pretty good for a startup: I rarely get pinged after hours. There is an extra day off every month.

Pay and benefits are really good.

There is a very public effort to hire a diverse team and create an inclusive workplace.

A lot of growing pains (not the worst problem to have): we are just now finally "doing things right" in some areas, so there are a lot of core products that need to be built out, requiring a ton of migrations that are painful when done on systems and data that have been around for the better part of a decade.

Even small problems can cause a huge nightmare for users when we're trying to be their primary/only bank. If there is a service down for a few minutes, that can have a huge negative impact on members, so even small mistakes can have huge consequences. (The good news here is that we are very aware of this and there is every effort made to prevent outages).

Some teams don't have the best communication about what's important, and getting on the same page in planning sessions can be a nightmare.

Leadership team is not very diverse.

Focus on planning and setting reasonable deliverables with the headcount at the time.