DigitalOcean

There are too many to list here, but I'll break down the points that had the most impact for me:

• In everything I've done, I've felt respected and cared for. There was a table full of swag ready for me before I got to the office for my first day, I've been given every possible opportunity to succeed, and I've never felt pressured to do anything if I didn't think it would help me be successful.

• The perks are incredible. I work here, and I still have a hard time believing how good the benefits are. My friends actually don't believe me. Commuter benefits for remote employees, plenty of really nice swag, workstations and peripherals ... it's just awesome.

• I'm really surprised at how well everyone communicates remotely. I don't even need to ping people most of the time - people are frequently checking any Slack channels with new messages, so I can just leave a message and someone will get back to me in a few minutes. I haven't ever worked in a remote culture that feels this good.

• I'm constantly encouraged to fix any problems I discover. I manage my goals and projects, and everyone trusts me to know what I'm doing. I'm given a lot of responsibility, but in turn, I feel empowered and eager to improve the product.

The amount of responsibility I'm given is not something I'm used to from my previous position. At first, I didn't know what to do - I was told, "We're experiencing problems in this area. Talk to some people, come up with a proposal for a solution, and write up some stories."

It didn't take too long for me to feel empowered by this approach, but coming from a company that took a more overbearing approach ("We have decided that you will solve these stories, based on problems that we don't think you need to know details about"), it was a bit of a culture shock. It's overall a positive point, but the onboarding learning curve was a little steeper than I'm used to.

The culture of trust, love, and empowerment is overwhelmingly positive.

From what little I know of the past DO, I believe that we're moving in a great direction, and I hope to be a part of it for a very long time. Keep the culture positive and continue to empower engineers. While most of my friends are not looking for jobs, my stories of working at DO actually have convinced some of them to consider being referred.