Zoom

From the CEO down, leadership has been authentic and made best efforts to walk the walk.

They answer hard questions/comments from employees, come up with solutions, then actually make sure it is working.

For example, "No [Internal] Meeting Wednesdays." People were feeling burned out with meetings, and they implemented this policy. While it was probably never meant to be a black and white rule, I guess it wasn't always being respected by different layers in the org. So the leadership has continued to revisit it and ensure it is actually being respected (even if there are some that don't follow it still).

My managers have also embodied these traits, even being proactive about noticing things like late meetings for our timezone, then reaching out to let us know we can push to have it recorded to respect our evenings.

I've yet to have an issue with a coworker; so far, pretty much everyone has been talented and pleasant to work with. At least on my team, working remotely has been part of the DNA of the team, so I don't feel disadvantaged in any way being remote, even in a different timezone than most.

The core "delivering happiness" value is also seen in our benefits. There may not be the same, perhaps excessive, benefits compared to other big tech companies, but they are still really good from my perspective. They feel generous and intentional.

Day-to-day work as an engineer leaves a bit to be desired. So many engineers and cross-functional team members are new to Zoom from the last year or two. There is a lack of institutional knowledge in a lot of areas that leads to a fair amount of inefficiency with the product development process. Little information to go on at times, little dev environment or biz requirement issues, and it's hard to find someone that has the answers, etc. It has been somewhat difficult to drive significant fulfillment from the day-to-day work personally, so far.

Working with coworkers on the opposite side of the globe is difficult as well. While we do have support for maintaining a work-life balance, it is difficult to balance maintaining boundaries but also coordinating to ensure project success.

That being said, I don't believe this is unique to Zoom, and I do believe in the active work being done to improve matters.

I think Zoom has perhaps had a culture of engineers owning a lot of product development. This is great in a vacuum as an engineer.

But when working cross-functionally with much bigger teams, it isn't as effective for engineers to play the role of QA and product/PM, do the coding, then deal with a ton of process to push even small amounts of work out.

I understand the need for it since we have to prioritize stability and security in a lot of cases, but I think a better balance is needed. Perhaps hire or train existing cross-functional team members to assist in or take over these tasks so engineers can focus on deep work.

As far as working with coworkers half a day ahead, I think we need to either:

• Continue to find better ways to work asynchronously with each other.
• Try to keep more projects with coworkers within a few timezones of each other.

The middle ground is more difficult.

I know there's no way to make drastic improvements overnight and do believe the team is active in trying to find a balance.