Elastic

• Everything I hoped for and more.
• Distributed by design, the culture needed for this kind of thing to actually work and scale appears to be successfully transmitted.
• You talk to older employees, and almost all of them are surprised that it has scaled.
• The organization tries to measure and improve employee engagement.
• Thoughtful leadership and approach to solving problems in the competitive market has been inspiring to watch.
• Leadership really tries to make employees take advantage of paid volunteer time off and "spacetime."
• I regularly have peak experiences as I meet different people across the org and hear their opinions on topics from hiring to leadership. It's affecting me positively as a human being.
• Autonomy is required for this thing to work, and the organization somehow has nailed it. Makes me feel almost bitter toward past management in contrast because the teams self-organize and execute without being micromanaged.
• True engineering company. Engineers are orthogonal to management/leadership, not below them.
• Cool problems to work on, and lots of them. Freedom to move to areas of interest.

There's not much room for juniors to come in as the company is distributed. I don't believe that someone extremely junior could get what they need.

The average age in the company is older as a result of not hiring juniors. This is not really a con, just unfortunate that people can't experience Elastic until they are further on in their career.

Onboarding can be disorienting. Distributed companies can highlight mental health risks due to social isolation. It requires self-management.

There is sometimes some ambiguity in direction, which is challenging to some people. You have to be comfortable standing up for yourself and tackling problems, as you do get a lot of autonomy and freedom. However, that means that the quality of the individuals working in a team is forefront in its success.

There's explosive growth, which causes the need to shuffle and redesign the company and working styles. You need to be comfortable and open to handle the change.

Keep focusing on the source code. Over-communicate it again and again and again, because it's working. The source code and the culture are so important, and it was transmitted to me within a few months. If we can keep the source code moving through the new hires, I don't know what the limits of the company are.