Elastic

I love this company so much. The distributed nature allows you the flexibility to live your life, or as they say, "be home for dinner".

The mentality of the company is low stress while still maintaining a commitment to delivering an incredible product. As a product, we cannot easily have a continuous deployment where we can just push new code to fix breaking changes, and everyone has the latest patched version. As a result, we have the concept of a "train" release, meaning the train is going to leave the station on time, and if your code is ready to go, perfect. But if you're pushing to get your code in, that usually goes hand-in-hand with bugs and errors. So at Elastic, we strive to make the best improvements to our products but try not to sacrifice quality. I have never seen this forward-thinking mentality at any other company.

One of my favorite things about this company is Shay. I love listening to him talk about the company because he describes what went through his head to make each decision; it's incredible. He is one of those people that doesn't jump to an opinion on something until he has all the facts and has actually taken the time to think about all the circumstances at play. He knows how much power his voice carries, particularly from a code perspective, and will sometimes take a back seat to let the talented developers come to a solution on their own, without his influence. He genuinely cares about all Elasticians and is constantly improving the culture of the company to be more inclusive and more enjoyable. Also, he is just a down-to-earth guy that you would bump into on the train and have a great conversation with, never knowing he was the CEO of a company.

The work-life balance at Elastic is what you make of it. The distributed team makes for a lot of flexibility and a lot less structure, in terms of time. I have been known to work late some days as I am already home, and one hour leads to two or three past when I should have stopped for the day. So, in a way, you make your own balance, and it is important to have the self-discipline to stop at a reasonable time.

Another thing I love is the people. I have never met a more jovial and supportive group of people in my career. On top of that, you often work with people all over the country, from Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and more.

When people first join the company, they go through an in-person orientation of sorts, and you learn about how the company started and how it has progressed into what it is today. You learn about all of the facets of the company, from engineering to support. And as I sat there and listened, I was amazed at how this company and the leadership have iterated on things that were not working in the past and found a "secret sauce" for how they do what they do.

I think one thing that is on everyone's mind is the TC. At Elastic, I feel so privileged to work at such an amazing company; I would take less money to work for this company than they are paying me. That said, I think the TC is above the industry average. There are tradeoffs, certainly tradeoffs in TC, with working for a remote company, but I choose Elastic over Amazon and many others and have never looked back. Having friends from Dropbox, Netflix, and Google, their compensation is often better, particularly with the equity, but several of them now want to work for Elastic after they hear me constantly praise the company.

I could write more, but I'll stop here.

I have been with Elastic almost a year now, and I am struggling to come up with any negatives. I think the only negative was during the interview process, which was about 2 weeks between responses. That seemed excessive, but at the time I was unaware they were a distributed company, so I cut them some slack on that. But overall, we could be better at response punctuality during interviews.

There is also sometimes a lot of change, moving teams around to facilitate a given initiative in the short-term while we hire people to fill the gaps for the long-term. It is a smart tactic to get things done, but it can be somewhat taxing on the developers.

Keep up the great work!