Gusto

People deeply care about each other's wellbeing, about our customers, and about getting the details right. I see this everywhere I look, and it really helps me to stay motivated.

Strong business fundamentals and broad market. Every small business with employees needs to compensate them. It's the first service these companies invest in, and it's the last they divest in if their business is struggling.

Transparency. Every two weeks, we get a rundown of how the company is doing, and the strategic perspective helps me make day-to-day choices.

Full-stack engineering. I walked in as a front-end engineer, and I'm now making edits on everything from deployment scripts and database queries to API endpoints and CSS.

Pair programming. Engineering here is deeply collaborative. I feel really comfortable reaching out to anyone in the engineering org for a pairing session. There's no shame in asking for help (unlike the org I came from), and I learn a lot every time I pair with someone.

We don't have everything figured out yet. There are lots of opportunities to make a big impact, and there's very little process hampering individuals from making changes.

We don't have everything figured out yet. We're hitting internal scaling limits on a lot of our ad-hoc processes, and we're still trying to figure out how to communicate in ways that are more durable and inclusive than Slacking.

Like most businesses of our size, the time investment is significantly greater than at a larger company.

The open plan is especially noisy due to the construction materials in the current office (lots of hard surfaces).

We rename everything. I appreciate the spirit behind it (trying to communicate a mindset that's different than industry standards), but it gets unwieldy, especially when talking to folks who are thinking about working here.

Keep up the communication! As the staff grows, it will be harder and harder to maintain the same clarity of transparency that we have now.

Invest in VC solutions. Google Hangouts is pitifully bad for communicating with Denver.

Invest in internal tooling. Some of the internal tools feel neglected.