Software Engineer • Current Employee
Pros: 1. Career opportunities.
Rippling has a huge vision and moves very fast in order to get there. Accordingly, career opportunities for individuals are immense. I’ve been at the company for a few years now and have seen teams as small as 2-3 people build entire product lines that compete with incumbents that have hundreds of employees. Moreover, there’s enough to do within each team that you can wear many hats and work on skills outside of the domain you’re hired into (e.g. an engineer wearing a product hat for a particular feature, or a product engineer taking up a machine learning feature).
2. Meritocratic.
Rippling is also super meritocratic and recognizes high achievers quickly. There’s no minimum waiting period or anything of the like for someone to get promoted and recognized for their accomplishments. I’ve seen people have such an outsized impact that they’re promoted within a few months of being hired, or even promoted 3+ times within their first 3-4 years.
3. Ambitious culture.
Rippling self selects for high achievers and ambitious people who thrive in a nimble work environment. A lot of the product and engineering org is made up of ex-founders, and many ex Rippling employees have gone on to start their own companies. You end up building a great network here.
Cons: 1. Rippling isn’t your typical 9-5 and accordingly isn’t for everyone. The company moves fast, and you’re challenged to ship high-quality work quickly.
That being said, it’s still possible to maintain a work-life balance with some effort, but by no means should you expect to be able to coast and do things at your own time. I’ve found that such a fast-paced environment lends itself to learning quickly and often comes with career-elevating opportunities.
2. The culture can feel a bit disorganized at times (e.g., poorly documented code, unstructured processes, lots of cross-team communication/back-and-forth to get something across multiple teams done), but that’s a result of growing pains and not a fundamental issue.
The neat part is that a little bit of disorganization also empowers you to fix a problem or help define what should be done when you stumble upon something that can be improved. In my experience, that’s been particularly rewarding, as any problem you see, you’re enabled to fix it (or delegate) yourself.