Persona

• Everyone in the company is extremely helpful and friendly. It really does feel like a band of brothers and sisters tackling the world. As with any startup, it's common for folks to stay late at the office, but nearly every late office stay is followed by folks either playing games, chit chatting, an impromptu happy hour, or genuinely enjoying each others company.

• The onboarding experience does a great job at explaining the company, the field it operates in, the technical terms that we're bound to encounter, and also gets us playing with the product. I also really enjoy the Q&A sessions with each executive leader. The workramp educational material is very well designed and organized. I felt I went from zero to relatively decent understanding of our company and product landscape in a short amount of time.

• The CEO is extremely involved in a way that is not overbearing. He can and does answer questions about all matters of the business (engineering, sales, marketing, fundraising, customer support, competition, etc...) with excruciating detail and real company examples and stories, which gives me confidence of his understanding of the company and where it falls in the overall business landscape.

• Overall, I really enjoy how authentic management is, that is, how true to themselves they are while at the same time being very good at their jobs. That authenticity shrinks the employee-management gap, which makes it a lot easier to interact with leadership in a genuine way. I really appreciate that.

• The engineering onboarding is a bit non-existent. Even amongst startups, the engineering team operates in a very "high context" culture. It takes a long time to learn how things should be done for any particular task. Though there's some documentation around certain protocols, it's hard to find that documentation until you learn the right terminology to search for (or just spend all your time reading the entire wiki). Even then, the wikis are often either out of date, or so cutting edge, that the protocols explained there are not how people are actually doing things today.

Most things you only really learn by doing them incorrectly and then being told by peers of the right way to do it. This makes engineering onboarding take an extremely long time as you slowly learn how to effectively operate in the company.

• I do worry that the leadership team takes on too much. This is a common con in nearly all startups, so it's not specific to Persona, but I do worry of the example the leadership team is setting by working as much as they do. On the bright side, I see some of this turning over, as the leadership team has expressed the need to slow our pace down and announced additional holidays for the sole purpose of taking mental health breaks.

• I think investing a bit more in engineering onboarding would help make people more effective more quickly after hiring. I think a good example of something simple that could pay great dividends is Neal Harris's Security for Engineers training in workramp.

Having something like that that would cover the day to day tasks of engineering work at Persona would be extremely useful. As I write this, I recall the spin up buddy system for engineering onboarding -- perhaps this normally would've worked well, but unfortunately my buddies were not available due to incidents and leave, and though I can see it working pretty well for in-office, both my buddies were remote, which made it more difficult to onboard with that system.