Faire

No company is perfect, but Faire is certainly the best company that I have worked for.

As an organization, I see that Faire lives out its five values:

• Be kind
• Serve our community
• Embrace the adventure
• Seek the truth
• Be an owner

There are certainly periods where one is prioritized over the other, but a culture receptive of and intentionally seeking feedback helps the company maintain a balance between its five values. Using these values as fuel to drive business decisions, coupled with teams with strong executional skills, I always felt Faire can achieve what it sets out to do and more.

As with many startups, the company moves fast. And that’s exciting. Since one of the values is to embrace the adventure, employees are encouraged to embrace the fast-paced nature of the work.

Note that this doesn’t mean that you are expected to work beyond normal working hours, though I’m sure many do.

But one of the biggest detriments to the company’s style of being fast-paced is that it leads the company, and thus its people, to have many areas to focus on. This is great for those who are just getting into the industry, or in the early stages of their career. But for those at an intermediate level, it can cause difficulties towards their career progression as they may be stretched across too many surface areas to the point that it becomes difficult for them to naturally show their capabilities and bring about deep impact to the business and others.

It’s both a matter of focus, but also opportunity. This is worsened by the fact that senior-level employees are more often being brought in from outside rather than from existing talent.

The first is clearly on the topic of career progression for intermediate engineers. While the company clearly communicates what the criteria are for the next level and that it is important for each individual to take ownership of their career progression, often the day-to-day operation makes that less than feasible.

There are plenty of talent in Faire that is hungry to do deeper and more impactful work, and I’d like to see Faire put more deliberate effort in nurturing them so that senior-level quality work can grow. This will benefit both Faire and its people.

The second: Faire is a very data-driven company. The OKRs, planning, roadmap, forecasting, and even office needs are backed up by supporting quantitative data. But a focus on quantitative data has left the company’s muscle around qualitative data rather lacking (in comparison).

Qualitative data analysis feels more ad-hoc, and there is no strong guidance from management, product, design, and of course, engineering. I hope this is an area that Faire pays more attention to grow more formally throughout the company.