Clio

• Working from home since COVID.

• Get to work with intelligent people (IQ and EQ), but this also depends on your team.

• Great CI pipeline and engineering practices.

I used to rave about this company and was so happy to work here. But my outlook has changed drastically.

Salary:

• The new salary review process makes it more difficult to get a raise. I consider myself a high performer and have been told that by past managers at the company. Based on the new criteria, I am only an average performer. The definition for a high performer is basically being an executive or performing a job for which you are heavily underpaid.
• If you take advantage of the work-from-home situation, the pay can be worth the work-life balance, but the company tries to make it hard to achieve, never giving a break to enjoy the job. Pay could be improved in general though.
• The company uses staff volunteers for the annual Clio Conference, getting hundreds of work hours for free. Some positions are required to work for it without additional compensation (usually not engineering, luckily). You'll be more "accepted" if you volunteer.

Engineering:

• Understaffed and expecting too much of teams.
• There is always a push for earlier deadlines to compete with a competitor. There is not enough recovery time.
• Unstable environment; expect to get moved around across projects and teams as their deadlines are moved earlier.
• Teams aren't staffed appropriately. A team of backend developers will be on a frontend project with only one frontend developer. This adds additional strain to the individual on the team and not enough support for the rest. This would be fair if the team was given time to learn, but they are not.
• Whether you enjoy your time will depend on your manager. Teams are siloed. A poor manager can ruin it, and a great manager can make it worth your while.

Benefits:

• Benefits are not exciting compared to other tech companies.
• Why is each paycheck deducted for the health benefits? It's not really a benefit if we are paying for it. Other companies cover this.

Stop pushing engineering to work harder, faster, and longer to compete with competitors. Provide a healthy and sustainable environment if you want to retain talent, or pay better.