Slack

1. Culture! I've been in many positions and interviews that talk the talk, but don't walk the walk. Slack's culture is different. After only a month, my manager asked, "did you take time off between jobs? If not, find some time soon to take a few days away."

2. Public-Channel Culture: Kind of an extension of the above. Have you been at a company where asking questions in public channels was frowned upon? I have. But at Slack, you are highly encouraged to ask in public channels so others can search your answer in the future. I've had DMs with staff engineers who ask me to re-ask in a public channel so they can answer.

3. Developer Experience: Need to test a front end change? Backend change? Async message job? Cron job? It's all simple, and setup is less than a minute. Hands down the best development experience I've had.

1. Documentation seems weak across the company. This encourages asking openly, which is nice, but sometimes I really want to start with a doc to get a basic understanding.

2. So many channels! Project channels, feature channels, development channels, escalation channels... This is a classic "pro and a con." It is incredibly overwhelming at first, and you really need to manage your time wisely. Speaking of which...

3. Be self-driven, or be behind: Slack more than other companies prefers self-driven, autonomous developers. Devs who prefer more structure to their everyday work may find it difficult to know what to do, and when.

4. Salesforce is a bit cheap: Salesforce, Slack's parent company, will wine-and-dine you for onboarding, which is nice! But that seems to be where it ends. After 3 months, there has been no mention of virtual team lunches or happy hours. On top of that, Salesforce is actively rolling back benefits they put in place during COVID, such as more permissive reimbursement for fitness. That is such an easy win for the company that I am aghast that they rolled it back. I'm sure they'll still throw a heck of a party for sales and clients though.

There seems to be a strong idea of doing things "the Slack way", which is good because it creates a consistent Slack-wide expectation for how things are done.

However, this can box out some developer's strengths. Find ways to emphasize each dev's strengths day-to-day, even if it may be just a little different than the norm.