Clio

This is the best place I've ever worked. Employees are supported, mental health and wellbeing are valued, and there is a great atmosphere in the huge number of Slack channels.

The company has 7 values which are often referred to in daily activities, and it feels genuine rather than forced. The internal karma giving system allows you to highlight when a colleague exemplifies a certain value. The company mission is also meaningful and socially valuable, at least in my opinion.

The Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging and Equity effort is phenomenal. The company is really good at recognising and acknowledging what is happening in the world and encouraging people affected to take the space they need. The DIBE Council run fantastic learning sessions and Employee Resource Groups.

There is the X-Team, which is a group that handle initial onboarding of staff and organising socials both company-wide and within teams, on request. I think it's with nothing that they've done an absolutely phenomenal job of being creative and innovative with remote activities during the pandemic.

Talking of the pandemic, the success of remote working has resulted in the company declaring a future where you can choose to work from home, work in the office, or some mix of the two. You can even work anywhere in Canada (within a few parameters).

To enable this to succeed, lots of work is being done to shift the operating procedures to be Distributed by Design.

From an engineering point of view, the developer experience is excellent. Local dev environments can be set up on day 1, and the CI/CD is so smooth you can have your first code in prod in the first week. Good communication between product and engineering means realistic timelines are set for delivery, so crunch is relatively rare. 2-day hackathons take place every quarter (actually, not just a vague claim), and everyone in engineering is expected to participate; presenting your project is optional, and you can work on anything; it doesn't have to be related to Clio products and it doesn't even need to be code.

There's a Manager of Developer Experience who does an excellent job of ensuring it's a nice place to be an engineer.

Some things feel a bit opaque to me. The talk of progression is encouraging, but it's not entirely clear to me how people actually get promoted or get raises. How decisions are made in middle management isn't really clear, though as an engineer maybe it's good to be protected from that?

I've also heard some others have not as good an experience as me. I think that may be down to certain managers and their approach to running a team.

Sharing salary bands will likely help people assess if they feel fairly compensated.

Please do what you can to maintain this culture as the company grows and shifts to a distributed working model. It is so good right now; it would be a shame to lose any of it.