Vercel

There was a time period I went back and forth on whether I thought this was the place for me. It could be burnout at times, making me question it, which happens at any company regardless of the work. It could also be imposter syndrome sneaking in, making me question if I can continue to perform at a high level.

Ultimately, one factor that has kept me moving forward is the people I work with. I have had the pleasure of working with several teams, and they are not just good engineers but overall good people. Easy to get along with, they provide great feedback, and are full of drive to build great things.

It is also not limited to just engineers. People go above and beyond anything I have ever seen in other companies. Sales builds out incredible updates/pitch decks and shares information I normally would find myself seeking, but I have found it quite motivating. Managers I've had so far are friendly and easy to tell if something is bothering me or if I'm just feeling burnout and pressing on.

Workload can be daunting but goes in waves. It's ultimately a team effort and is driven by customer needs and deadlines to meet them.

Projects you work on can change, and I'll admit some are not as exciting as others, but mostly have high impact, which is rewarding.

Review/feedback process is more thorough than I expected. I worked on several projects outside of my team and half expected it to get missed, but all of it was noted and brought up during my review. This gave me a lot of confidence that my work was noticed, to include projects that had been scratched internally due to changes in vision. They really do value experimentation and understand things move fast, but effort was given regardless of the outcome.

Overall, I have enjoyed my time working for Vercel, regardless of the inevitable burnout that comes when you code day after day. As for now, I can see myself working here for sometime.

Workload can be overwhelming, but I guess that's a good thing for job security.

Direction can change quickly based on customer feedback. This could mean what you are currently working on could be delayed, postponed, or cancelled, which does feel a little defeating when you worked hard on something. It comes with the job, though.

I think my main gripe would be that there are many intelligent minds at the company, which can lead to conflicting visions of what some products should look like or how they function. In some cases, this has caused lots of rework on the same thing, trying to find the right balance. This varies between projects, but writing several iterations of code to do similar things is not my favorite thing to do.