PagerDuty

There are so many pros. The culture is fantastic. The people are phenomenal. The work-life balance and flexibility is incredible. PagerDuty being a remote-first company on top of all that is the cherry on top.

Good communication and teamwork are valued here. Everyone is always willing to answer questions patiently and without judgement. Incidents and incident reviews are truly blameless. That is unheard of in other tech spaces.

There is a lot of opportunity for career growth here for engineers. There is a big emphasis on internal promotions. Engineering promotions are always well-deserved. Everyone wants to see everyone succeed.

The benefits in general are great: very generous PTO and leave policy, RSUs and an ESPP program, 401k matching, generous HSA contributions, and more.

The diversity here is unmatched for a tech company and equity/inclusion initiatives are noticeable and appreciated.

A lot of the things that made PagerDuty great are slowly being chipped away. I'm calling this out because I love PagerDuty and I want it to be better.

We used to have a mid-year wellness week where every single employee went on a company-paid vacation, all at the same time. This was the single greatest thing. Everyone would brag about this to anyone who would listen.

There used to be a wellness day every month (started during COVID) where everyone had the day off at the same time. Just like the mid-year wellness week, this ensured everyone was able to rest and no one felt like they needed to go online and catch up on missed messages. There are 5 fewer wellness days now.

The mid-year wellness break and the many wellness days were so loved and are very missed. While we still have winter hibernation (this is now company-paid) and we have only lost one week total in company-paid (non-PTO) time off... it feels like two weeks total.

We used to have two hackweeks a year; we are now down to one a year. Hackweeks encourage innovation and creativity; they interrupt the monotony of work. They spark new ideas and foster a collaborative environment. These are values every tech company should be championing.

The highly sought-after and competitive internship program (CAP) was paused indefinitely. This was such an important pipeline for inbound talent and really put PagerDuty on the map as CAP was open to career-changers and not just recent grads. Pausing the internship program seems short-sighted.

Our organization's internal convention was slated to be an in-person event but that was also cut and a hybrid model was attempted. If you were near an office, you were welcome to come in... if you were not, you had to attend virtually. This disparate experience left a sour taste in the mouth of a lot of remote folks who had no ability to visit an office, no travel budget, no opportunities to build rapport with coworkers.

Layoffs in January 2023, which felt unnecessary and also short-sighted, have brought down morale further. We keep hearing "the macro" but it truly seemed that we did layoffs because every other company was doing layoffs at that time. The way it was handled was terrible, and I'm not sure morale has recovered since.

1. Bring back the benefits and programs that put PagerDuty above the rest. We notice the slow chipping away of all the good stuff. When does it stop?

2. Remember how important innovation and freedom are in the tech industry. Let your engineers experiment. Continue to foster the amazing culture here.

3. Give back to your remote employees. There's a lot of perks for going into the office but if you don't live near an office location, you're out of luck. If you have an org-wide event, make it entirely in-person or entirely remote. Be considerate of your employees.

4. Increase the 401k match as 2% is significantly below market.