Marqeta

1. Culture

The company in general has a very upbeat, transparent, and engaging culture. It commits to its values. Since I started working here, I have witnessed a sincere push to make things better, including our products, internal processes, communications, and working environment. These are things which are never perfect, and I feel that most people at Marqeta, including upper management, consistently strive to adapt and improve all areas of the business. In my experience, most people respond well to respectful, critical feedback. Standard procedure is to approach problems in a blameless and constructive manner.

1. Diversity

The workforce is incredibly diverse with regard to socio-economic background, race, ethnicity, and education. In my experience, team members are respectful and inclusive of all individuals regardless of sexual orientation, gender, and other differences. Employees generally seem to make a conscious effort to help everyone feel that they belong.

1. Compensation

From my perspective, Marqeta seems to have very competitive salaries and meaningful equity. The company demonstrates that it values its workforce by providing substantial pay and benefits.

1. Management

Every management team I've ever heard of has people severely criticizing them and their leadership. That is no different here. Managers are people too, and they make mistakes. The important thing to me is that they recognize them, accept them, and constantly strive to improve. I feel most management at Marqeta does this. Not all, but most, which is far more than I can say about other places I've worked.

1. Trust

Leadership places a great deal of trust in each employee. This has been a remarkable contrast from my previous employment, where employers appeared relatively distrustful of employees' motivations and interests. Not so here. I feel Marqeta respects and trusts its people to do their work and do it well, while implementing procedures and infrastructure to avoid, mitigate, and learn from honest mistakes.

1. Product

Marqeta's card products are amazing. We're hitting a market with enormous potential. While improvements can always be made, I feel we're moving in the right direction here.

1. Tech debt

This is probably true for almost any tech company growing out of its start-up phase, but the tech debt at Marqeta is real and significant. A lot of effort has been going into paying down this debt, but there is still a lot to do here. Maintaining aging systems and processes is an unpleasant reality for most teams as we simultaneously build out new features and capabilities.

An unfortunate side-effect of this is that teams have less room for thoughtful innovation. We are under pressure to build more while keeping the older systems fully functional, which is straining engineering resources. Adding more to the workforce is helping here as well, but it will likely take some time to have a significant effect.

1. Prioritization challenges

Teams at Marqeta have struggled to optimally prioritize work. A recent procedural change to improve the situation is being implemented (V2MOM), and though it has not yet been fully put to the test, I'm cautiously optimistic that it will have positive impacts in the way we prioritize our efforts moving forward.

1. Fires

The reality of working with critical production software that never sleeps is that when things fail, sometimes you've got to be the one willing to get up at 3am to fix it. Occasionally you'll be working some crazy hours. My first week on call was quite eventful (unfortunately) and I ended up working several hours over the weekend.

Team support works wonders here. My group has been excellent about trading schedules and giving team members a break when its needed. I'm not sure if that behavior is widespread throughout the company, but it absolutely needs to be.

That said, as more of our outstanding tech debt is tackled, the breadth and severity of fires is improving. Our team's on-call shifts have, thankfully, seen far fewer incidents over the past several weeks. As the company matures, and our processes, procedures, and codebase improves, I suspect on-call shifts will continue to improve as well.

Be proactive and assertive about giving personnel who just worked tough shifts a break. Same for high performers. They frequently get asked for things beyond their current scope of work and aren't always assertive about looking after their own wellbeing when reaching burnout.

Continue working toward more accountability, particularly concerning promises you have made to employees under your management.

Do what you can to avoid letting the loudest voices control the conversation. Sometimes those who are the most boisterous reflect only the opinions of a small minority.