Tech companies that value work/life balance for their engineers

Work/life balance is precisely why we started this company.

When we started in 2000, engineers were often siloed. There seemed to be a lack of respect for both the work engineers were doing and their balance between work and personal commitments. Carbon Five was founded by a group who saw value in people’s ability to focus very intensely during the day and then completely unplug at night. To us, work/life balance means that when you come into work, you work hard and when you’re done, you’re completely done. You get to work on really interesting things without the overhead of politics, harsh deadlines, working weekends, or pagerduty. This holds true even after 20 years in the business and now with a team of 70+ software engineers, designers, product managers, and an operations crew spanning our U.S. offices.

We also offer sabbaticals. One of the benefits of being a consulting company is that it’s natural and easy for people to take time off. After one project ends, there’s a wrap up period, which provides an opportunity to take time off without disruption. Once you’ve been with the company for two years, you can take three months off (unpaid). It is an uninterrupted block of time that people use to spend the entire summer with their kids, surf, launch an album, or go rock climbing.

No one should have to choose between family and career.

At The Mom Project, our mission is to build a better workplace for women, parents, and the businesses they support. To do this successfully, we believe in creating a healthy work/life balance where we can put ourselves and our families first while simultaneously having fulfilling careers. This means we look for smart, talented people who are willing to take on a large amount of responsibility and give them the trust to manage their schedules accordingly. For example, Yiota, our CTO, likes to take a lunchtime Pilates class and Rocki, our Chief People and Equity Officer, has time scheduled on her calendar daily to work on her passion project, writing a book. Employees can also take advantage of several stipends, such as a $500 annual health and wellness stipend (which can be used for things like gym memberships, meditation apps, new running shoes, etc) and an $80 monthly WFH stipend (for items you’d typically find in an office, ordering coffee, etc.). We also offer a subscription to Talkspace, a behavioral health therapy platform, at no cost for employees and their dependents.

Ultimately, we lead with empathy and heart and strive to ensure high-quality work isn’t mutually exclusive with prioritizing your passions, hobbies, time with family, and other commitments.

We know you’re more effective when you can take time off and recharge, so we have 4-day workweeks.

For over three years, our team members have worked 4-day workweeks. Building a growing startup, it is more important that you’re making the right decisions or taking calculated risks than writing more lines of code.

Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided to ditch the office altogether and be fully distributed. We found that we were all equally productive at home and the flexibility gave us even more opportunities to recharge and bring our best selves to work. The default day off is Wednesday (aka mid-weekend), which makes our team super fresh on Thursdays. That said, we are flexible if you want to take a long weekend and work Wednesday once in a while.

People always ask how we are able to successfully work 4-day workweeks and still scale the business, and the truth is we practice what we preach. Having that extra time off enables us to be more impactful overall. In fact, we recently closed a $20M Series B and are continuing to hire!

We work hard, but believe everyone should lead full lives outside of the office, too.

Whether you’d prefer to be in our Seattle office or work from home, engineers have the flexibility to work wherever they’d like. As a distributed team that spans the globe, we have coverage across different time zones. For example, Cynthia (director of product management) lives on the east coast and prefers to start her day around 11am and finish later in the evening so she can help homeschool her son in the morning. That said, if you’re on the east coast and prefer to work 9-5, we encourage that too. “My team spans Seattle, England, and New Zealand, so we’re very conscious and accommodating of each other’s schedules,” says Thien-Kim (TK) (director of product management). Core meetings happen during overlapping periods of time (a small window that depends on your team’s schedule), but otherwise we trust you to get your work done when it suits you best.

In addition to 18 paid holidays and flexible time off (that people actually use!), engineers typically work ~40hr weeks. To keep our on-call system fair for everyone, we regularly rotate the schedule and have a bidding, auction-like system for holidays. Whatever your passions are outside of the office, we want you to take time to enjoy them, too. For example, Edgar, an interview engineer coordinator, is an avid photographer and Jason (staff software engineer) is passionate about puzzling. We also have several talented musicians on the team.

For us, work-life balance isn’t just proverbial time in and out of the office, we also believe in engineers having heads-down time during the workday. In fact, engineers block this time on their calendars and are very diligent about respecting it. That said, we also value time together in-person, and regularly have team bonding events and offsites (like ski trips or summer get-togethers) when it’s safe to do so.

We practice what we preach.

We’re dedicated to improving health outcomes not just for others, but for ourselves, too. In addition to nine wellness days that can be used for self-care or anything that comes up in life, we also have half-day Fridays year-long. Team members have access to fitness and mindfulness programs, and we believe in actually taking vacation to recharge, which is why we have a company-wide ~5-day mid-year break and a ~5-day end-of-year break. In addition to 15 days PTO and 18 paid holidays, employees are also eligible for a one-month (20 working days) sabbatical after their four-year anniversary. Folks have used this time to travel (one team member who lives in Brazil is taking his daughter to Disney World in Florida), visit loved ones, or take up a new hobby. During the pandemic, we’ve been flexible so that folks who wanted to travel could wait to take their sabbaticals. We even have some team members who are coming up on their second sabbaticals!

Tatiane (Software Engineer, fourth from left) enjoying one of her favorite hobbies Muay Thai.

You are more than your job.

You can’t be at your best if you’re not taking care of yourself and your family. We encourage each other to recharge and remind one another to take advantage of NerdWallet’s health and wellbeing benefits including gym membership, 100% paid family leave, and our Flexible Time Off (FTO) policy. So long as we are considerate of our coworkers and stakeholders, letting them know in advance when we take time away, everyone should be sure to unplug and disconnect from time to time. We trust team members will use FTO responsibly, meaning that no one abuses it and everyone uses it.

All of our teams have flexible working hours and we regularly hold offsites and other social events to take a break from day-to-day responsibilities together. Most engineers are on-call monthly, though it’s pretty quiet. There are still occasions where teams have to make a big push, but these are the exception and not the rule.

A big part of how we think about work/life balance is reflected in how we think about our workplace. We are committed to building and fostering an inclusive community for everyone. We have Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) like NerdOut (who provide a community and host on-site events for our LGBTQ nerds), NerdWomen, and Women in Engineering and Data. People can participate in ERGs by leading them, becoming a member, or being an ally to the ERG. Finally, we also arrange volunteering events through our community service group and field company teams for basketball, soccer, softball, and even cornhole. There are countless things to bond over, and we welcome them all!

We promote a healthy work/life balance during the workday, too.

To us, work/life balance isn’t just about making time for your friends, family, and passions outside of work (although of course that’s important). We also encourage people to take breaks during the day to connect with others in the company. This could be a monthly team lunch (we’ll expense your meal and often play an online game together) or a fun social to learn from others. One Zapien recently led a sake tasting! We also have weekly events such as Zappy Hour to bring the entire company together. They’re optional and we record them for people who’d like to enjoy them on their own time. What’s more, we have over five hundred pages of #fun- Slack channels such as #fun-cooking, #fun-fitness, #funDND, and #fun-adulting, just to name a few.

That said, if you’re not taking enough vacation, your manager will give you a friendly reminder to do so. While we have unlimited PTO, we recommend Zapiens take at least 2 weeks, and most of us take 4-5 weeks per year in addition to local holidays.

We know you do your best work when you’re not overworked.

We believe in providing a flexible and low-stress work environment. We do an anonymous survey of the team to make sure we’re keeping a sustainable pace, and most engineers work 40-hour weeks. No one is expected to work late or on weekends and in addition to 3 weeks of vacation, we shut down for the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Culture is also a great place for engineers looking to grow their families – we offer 12 weeks of paid parental leave for any parent who works here, regardless of caregiver status (including adoptions).

We recognize that for many people, Culture will be a stepping stone in your career. Our goal is to help you think through where you are now, where you’d like to go, and then help you build the skills, expertise, and experiences to get there. Your time here should be a two-way street, where you feel engaged in the work and supported as you grow, even if it’s into your next move. One way we’ll measure our success is through all of the great things our former employees go on to do.

We value our time both inside and outside of work.

We try to create a culture that encourages a healthy balance between work and life, as well as well-being and personal growth. In addition to PTO (15 days for the first year and 20 beginning your second year), we also offer 12 paid company holidays and 10 sick days. For folks who have been with us for five years, we offer a one-month paid sabbatical. Some team members used their sabbatical to spend more time with family, travel across the globe, or take additional classes to further their own personal development.

We provide holistic wellness, health, family planning, and leave benefits like our $2,000 annual wellness stipend, 8 hours of paid volunteer time off per quarter, and dollar-for-dollar donation matching (up to $1,000) to a charity of your choice, annually.

Fridays are reserved for personal development.

Engineers typically work 8-hour days. There’s no expectation of an on-call schedule and we never ask you to work on weekends or holidays. We don't manage hosting ourselves, and set the expectation with our clients that we will respond to code issues during business hours. That said, teams manage their own schedules and deliverables, so of course, it’s possible that during particularly busy weeks this can lead to spillover and some people might work outside of typical hours to have time for deep work. However, these overages are almost always self-inflicted, and if we notice it becoming a trend for anyone, we have direct conversations to make sure they know it should be a very rare occurrence. This comes from the top, from people that have worked in environments where burnout is the norm, and with full knowledge that dedicating 24/7 to anything is damaging not only to your mental well-being but also to your creative output and quality.

What’s more, we reserve Fridays for personal development, with the goal of building new skills and improving Upstatement as a whole. For example, a recent “semester” of Upstatement Fridays involved 10 projects with team sizes ranging from 3-6 people. Project types included marketing/publicity, product, and self-care. We've used this time to make improvements to upstatement.com, to explore new topics like Machine Learning, to create and improve internal tools and processes, and as outreach for our Friday speaker series.

We also allow for an "Independent Study," which is a lot more free form. For instance, one engineer chose to focus on writing blog posts. This personal development time is communicated upfront with our client teams from day one, so everyone is respectful of these boundaries.

Finally, we also close between Christmas and New Year’s Day to give everyone that extra time to recharge!

We strongly believe that to be productive at work, you need to live your life in balance.

We built this into the culture from day one, ensuring everything from time in the office to vacation policy supports this. Yes, we occasionally need to sprint hard, but we rest up to make sure we have the energy to do so.

We have an unlimited vacation policy, and our Chief Product Officer sets an example from the top by actually taking PTO. We encourage folks to take at least four weeks per year, and many take up to six. We know how important it is to unwind away from the office and will gently chide someone (we’re looking at you Brian 👀😂) if they haven’t taken a vacation in a while. The office also largely shuts down around the December holidays.

We value new parents, and with our paid leave policy (12 weeks for the birth parent and 6 weeks for the non-birthing parent), we’re flexible about doing it all at once, parceling it out over time, or tapering back into work with a few days per week and extended work-from-home.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to work/life balance.

We believe long-term success depends on striking a balance between working effectively and having enough time and energy to enjoy life outside of work. That doesn’t necessarily mean it will always be an equal balance, and we recognize that it will ebb and flow for each individual. That said, we strive to keep the pace sustainable and create an environment that actively avoids burnout. We encourage folks to take breaks from their daily work to connect with others in the company via our many Slack channels such as #wfh-cooking-club, #wfh-workouts, and #zoom-lunches. Indeedians can also take advantage of open paid time off to enjoy time with friends and family. We trust you to get your work done and take the time you need to recharge!

Our unlimited vacation policy isn’t just lip-service – we back it up with an annual stipend.

While we work hard, as a mindfulness company we practice what we preach. We know how important it is to take time to recharge, which is why we encourage employees to take at least a couple weeks of vacation every year and give them an annual stipend to help make the most of it. We also understand that life sometimes requires unexpected time off and we never want employees to work through pain. Our unlimited menstrual leave is just one example of how we double down on this. As Shawn (she/her), our Director of User Experience says, “In tech it’s easy to get caught up in the success-driven work cycles of overclocking yourself and resources. However, at CHANI, it’s understood that the quality of our work is inherently tied to our personal wellbeing. Everyone here gently holds each other accountable to better take care of ourselves. It's a challenge to pause and rest when you love your job and to work, and I really am grateful for the support of both my colleagues and supervisors encouraging me to take time off.”

When it comes to our day-to-day, we prioritize sustainability over production for production’s sake. While the company is based in Los Angeles, we have team members that span several different time zones. When it’s safe to do so, we’ll cover quarterly travel to LA as well as lodging for company retreats so we can take advantage of face-to-face time. Outside of certain meetings that are during PT hours, we trust you to get your work done in a way that suits you best. For example, Andy (he/him) lives in Nashville, so he works from his timezone on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. This allows for flexibility so Andy can go to the rock climbing gym (a hobby picked up during the pandemic!) in the mornings when it’s less crowded. Rebecca (she/her), who is based in DC, is a morning person and prefers to get an earlier start to the day, while Milcah is a night owl and sometimes works later in the evening. Whether it’s cooking, gardening, hiking or spending time with friends and family, we’re excited to learn about your hobbies and interests.

We also offer great benefits and perks for employees:

• Fully covered health, dental and vision insurance;
• 401k with a 5% match;
• Gender-based violence paid and protected leave;
• An annual tech stipend;
• A personal and professional growth stipend; and
• A stipend to help you build wealth.

We protect our weekends and practice no-meeting Wednesdays!

We want you to enjoy all aspects of your life at ReadMe, not just your work. Our friends, families, health, and hobbies are important to us! You don’t need an excuse to work from home or go climbing during daylight hours, and we genuinely encourage everyone to take advantage of their $150/month gym membership stipend. We offer full medical, dental, and vision coverage as well as 12 weeks of paid parental leave.

No one works late at ReadMe, and our Slack channels go silent on weekends. Luckily, our customers use ReadMe during typical work hours, which means traffic is highest during the weekdays and lower on the weekends. As a result, issues rarely take place during weekends or holidays, engineers don’t need to dread being on-call, and we can all truly take days off.

During the week, we like to spend time not working, too! We host happy hours and plan activities (like owl painting!) because we enjoy spending time together (and we love our mascot, Owlbert). We also go on quarterly offsites to make sure we mix play and work together as a team. In the past, we’ve gone to Hawaii, Austin, Chicago, Boston, Disneyland, and Lake Tahoe. We have a tradition of getting lithographs made for each location we go to and having everyone who was there sign them!

Our goal is to maintain an intense but sustainable working pace.

We work hard to deliver for our customers and grow quickly, but there’s a healthy middleground where this can be done without burning out the team. Andy, one of our engineering managers, joined as employee #10 and says it’s because our founders do a great job of leading by example. This summer Dimitri, our CEO, went on a rafting trip in the Grand Canyon and Matt, our CPO, spent a couple weeks in Europe.

Dimitri firmly believes the number one thing you can do for your team is to not burn out. While this runs counter to many people’s hero-mode thinking of “I have to grind to ship this because it’s best for the company,” we think differently. That’s why folks at Modern Treasury are encouraged to take time to recharge and enjoy their passions and hobbies outside of work.

We’re careful not to praise over-working.

Everyone has their own preferences for when and how they work best. We have team-based standups at the beginning of the week (i.e. engineering or product) and a company-wide all-hands at the end of the week. Beyond that, it’s up to teams to self-organize. Even once we’re a much larger company, we want each team to create a personalized meeting schedule based on team members’ needs and preferences, with a few exceptions of timezone-friendly company-wide events. Generally speaking though, we want you to work whenever that makes sense for you.

Having experienced burnout before firsthand (a topic Dan is especially happy to discuss), we’re really careful not to praise over-working. We are well aware that, sometimes, people are motivated to stay late and work long hours. We certainly won’t discourage anyone to stop working when inspiration strikes, but we also don’t expect this type of behavior. We want everyone we work with to feel energized at work and also have time for their out-of-the-office hobbies. Whatever your passions are outside of work, we want you to enjoy them! (For Fouad, that means trying new recipes. He loves to cook!)

Trade-offs: We believe people are most productive when they’re fulfilled during and outside of work, and that starts with having enough time to enjoy life away from the computer. There will be an endless stream of important tasks and it’s our responsibility as a team to identify the few truly urgent issues from the ones that we can pick up as a group on Monday.

We work hard, but make sure to take time to recharge, too.

It is inevitable that your work life influences your life outside of work (and vice-versa), and we strive to ensure that those influences are positive. Everyone at Repeat is empowered to take ownership of their health. Whether it’s getting outside for a lunchtime walk, taking a mental health day, or going on vacation, we support and encourage one another to take breaks.

We won’t tell you, “You’ve been working hard, take a day off,” because that robs you of your agency to make the choice for yourself and sets a precedent of asking for permission. We will, however, thank you for taking care of our team and yourself when you tell us about your upcoming vacation.

From spending time with friends and family to playing pickleball (Cory is a big fan) or traveling around the globe, we all have full lives outside of the office and make sure to take time to enjoy them!

Life is short, so it should be fun and fulfilling.

Sibi encourages a healthy work life balance by striving to maintain a traditional 40-hour work week. We never ask you to work on weekends or holidays. On-call pager duty rotations are scheduled and fairly divided by team so that no one is overwhelmed by off-hour emergencies. As we are a growing start-up, all Sibi employees maintain some flexibility to meet overall company needs and deliverables, but luckily our practices and processes limit any excessive asks.

You are responsible for managing your own time, in and out of the office; therefore, as long as your work is complete, your department covered, and your supervisor in agreement, full-time salaried employees have the flexibility to take time off when needed to simply recharge, spend time with family or recover from an illness.

Sibi team members don’t just strive for balance outside of the office, but we actively strive for balance throughout the workday, too. Whether it’s jamming to office tunes, pausing for a game of ping pong, or joining the team table for lunch, we understand the importance of having a healthy ebb and flow in your workday.

We also support your ability to grow and improve through self-development and education. Basically, we love our team and want them to kill it, so we are going to help you be the best you can be. If you want to go to a conference that makes you a badass, then we will pay for it. If you find a book that you think will make you a better salesman or better the organization, we will buy it. If you find something awesome that you think would benefit yourself and/or your team, simply outline your request and we will run it up the ladder for approval, with the stipulation that if you learn something amazing…you share it!

Whether you prefer a hybrid or remote work environment, we support both.

Our main office is located in Palo Alto, but we have team members who also work remotely across the United States. Upon joining, we provide a one-time $500 remote office stipend for all team members as well as a monthly $150 stipend to cover WFH costs such as internet and office supplies. Since the engineering team spans different time zones, we strive to overlap during core hours of 10am-2pm PST. However, we’re flexible and make sure to find meeting times that work for everyone. Outside of that, we trust you to manage your schedule and work in a way that suits you best. We also enjoy getting together for fun virtual and in-person events such as game nights and BBQs. Recently, we hosted our first semi-annual Ladder Meetup, where the team got together for a few days in Palo Alto.

We want everyone to take vacation and carve out time to enjoy their passions outside of the office. Many of us, including leadership, are parents. In fact, you’ll see Jack (our CTO) has time blocked off on his calendar for kid duty, which we greatly respect. If you’re looking to grow your family, we want you to have time to adjust without worrying about work, so we provide all parents (inclusive of adoption or fostering) 10 weeks of paid baby bonding leave.

Engineers at the company who have worked in a variety of startup environments confirm that Curai's work/life balance and flexibility are highlights of the Curai experience.

There are many reasons for this, but one forcing function is what we call "stage of life diversity" – some of our team members are fresh out of college while others have two kids in college, so as a team we are very respectful of coworkers' boundaries and commitments outside of work. Many of our team members have time-intensive hobbies that they are immensely passionate about, too, which we love! We think that being able to be your full self outside of work allows you to bring your best self to work. Those based in the U.S. align (loosely) around a 10 am to 5 pm Pacific Time working schedule and almost all engineers take weekends as a time to unplug and recharge.

Over 70% of Big Healthers are remote.

We’ve been remote since 2010, which means we’re experts at setting distributed teams up for success. Whether you prefer more heads-down time in the morning or later in the evening, there’s plenty of flexibility to help you do your best work. Leadership is also very cautious about communication outside of normal working hours (which can get a little tricky sometimes given that we span the US and the UK). However, with Slack and Google apps, you can take advantage of the schedule send feature to send emails within a person’s normal working hours. We invest in maintaining healthy boundaries, for example, through workshops that teach people how to make room for themselves and say no when needed.

Another way we support work/life balance is with our monthly Wellbeing Days. Employees can choose how to spend their day, whether it’s catching up on work, taking the day off, or something in between – without the distraction of email, Slack or meetings. Big Health is also a great place to work for people who are growing their families. In addition to generous parental leave (which you’re eligible for starting day one), we offer an optional flexible return to work program: employees may choose to work a reduced schedule of 10 total hours per week for the first 4 consecutive weeks after returning from new parent leave, at 100% of their normal rate of pay.

We recognize you have passions, hobbies, and other commitments outside of work and want you to enjoy them!

We work hard, but make sure no one is in danger of burning out.

While we have ambitious goals at Qualia – and plenty to do before we reach them – it’s important to us that everyone leads full lives outside of the office. While the team works San Francisco hours, we trust our engineers to manage their own time and work.

We also provide a benefits package designed with the health and happiness of our employees in mind. Our flexible time off policy allows people to take time away from the office to recharge, both physically and mentally. Qualia also offers a 401k program to help with financial planning and generous parental leave for teammates with growing families. While we’re remote during COVID-19, we also provide daily meditation sessions, online fitness challenges, and a variety of internal virtual clubs such as our diversity, equity, and inclusion book club.

A family-friendly, results-based management culture

Angaza offers flexible PTO (most people take around four weeks a year), paid parental leave (six weeks for all new parents and an additional six weeks for mothers giving birth), and an effective distributed culture that permits remote work. If you have any questions about working here while raising a family, you can ask one of the many Angazans who do.

As a broader team, we value personal connection. We get together in person when we can. We’ve played arcade games together, conquered escape rooms, gathered for picnics, and played frisbee. We hold regular team board game and movie nights. Within the company, you’ll often hear Angazans talking about “embracing their inner tembo”: this one of our five core company values. Tembo is the Swahili word for elephant. We take the mentality of being a part of the herd and supporting everyone in it.

There’s no one-size fits all work schedule.

Engineers are given reasonable chunks of work that we expect you should be able to finish in a week or two weeks – then we leave you alone to figure out how best to do that. There’s no expectation to work weekends and we’re mindful about keeping the pace sustainable. While there are of course dependencies on other people, collaboration between team members is frequent but generally ad hoc (see Flexible Work Arrangements above). This way, you’re able to set your own work schedule and make sure you have time to enjoy your passions outside of the proverbial office, too. For instance, our CEO Hunter is an avid traveler, several team members have cars in various states of disassembly, and Justin, our lead DevOps engineer, is a pro-amateur Frisbee Golfer.

You shouldn’t have to sacrifice quality of life for good pay.

Too many people in tech approach their careers as a simple compensation maximization problem. They end up in companies that are happy to pay them 10-100% more, but then demand they work 20-200% harder. All of this to say, at Upduo we believe in fair compensation and a healthy work/life balance. As Dani, our Director of Marketing says, “One of the things that drew me to Upduo was that two of our three founders are parents. When it comes to work/life balance, they lead by example.” Folks on the team (as well as our vendors) are great about respecting each other’s working hours and we strive to make sure evenings and weekends are free. Whatever your passions are outside of the office, we want you to take the time to fully enjoy them.

We prioritize employees’ mental and physical health.

In order to support our rapid growth, we recognize how important it is to have a healthy work/life balance. Our leadership leads by example and advocates taking PTO to avoid burnout. It can be all too easy to have Zoom fatigue these days and we encourage engineers to take mental breaks in between Zoom sessions. We also have company-wide hackathons to allow for play time; some examples of past hackathon features that we still use today include our weekly-summary page, custom monitoring solutions, and the search functionality in our content platform! When it comes to physical health, we give everyone access to the Virta app (Virta for Virtans!) so they can have the same nutritional tools and healthy habit-building advice we provide to patients.

Since our team is distributed, we have folks in multiple time zones and make sure to respect each other’s different working hours. That said, it’s nice to unwind together when we can, and we have annual summits (both in-person and virtual) to get to know each other better. We don’t expect you to be green on Slack 24/7 and know that everyone has a life outside of work. We’re proud to have several parents on the team, and whether you need to care for a sick child or leave early to attend a dance recital, we get it! As a healthcare company, we truly walk the walk and believe that your health comes first. If you’re passionate about helping others live healthier lives too, don’t hesitate to reach out!

We believe in healthy work/life balance and our founders lead by example.

Unlike many early-stage startups, we strive to keep the pace sustainable. Leadership sets a good tone by prioritizing both high-quality work and actually taking time to recharge away from the proverbial office. Currently, we’re a distributed team that covers every time zone in the U.S. and as we grow, we’ll consider exploring co-working when we get to multi-employee density in a given city. That said, we value the flexibility that working remotely allows. We totally understand if you need to pick up your kids from school or get some fresh air and go for a walk in the afternoon. We trust our team members to get their work done while also making time for their personal lives.

While we aim to have four overlapping work hours in a day, people generally set their own hours and are accountable for their own time. It’s important that we’re able to communicate asynchronously, but we’re also happy to hop on a call as needed when things are more complex or time sensitive. We target 40-hour workweeks, so there’s very limited occasions when after hours or weekend responses are expected, and we have special channels for that should the need arise.

All of us have passions, commitments, and hobbies outside of work, and we want you to be able to enjoy yours, too! For instance, Hays is a fan of trying adventurous street foods and loves getting outdoors to kayak, bike, and hike. Jackie is passionate about candle making. For Matt, a perfect work day is one that includes a conversation with a gig worker and a data discovery (plus a little extra time to cross-country ski with his family).

When you join Driver’s Seat Cooperative, you’re joining a tight group of people committed to radically changing the way that technology is used at work and in our communities. And, we’re about having fun and keeping things interesting while we do it.

It’s safe to say work/life balance is very strong here.

Everyone at ForUsAll is bonded by the mission to fix what’s broken with savings in America and help the underserved access quality retirement plans at work. Since we’re passionate about the work we’re doing, we take it upon ourselves to ensure we get the product, but no one is expected to work crazy hours. We all have interests and commitments outside of work - and many of us have families and children - so it’s important to us that work is part of an integrated, well-rounded lifestyle. We generally work an eight-hour day, and will check in to make sure you’re taking vacation and have the time you need to stay well-rested. If this resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you!

We had a heated debate about whether to choose this value. Let us explain:

Some people consider work/life balance to mean working 40 hours (or less) per week. You won’t find that here at Let’s Do This. Our hours are long, but we also find it difficult to say when exactly they start and stop when our work naturally integrates with every other part of who we are.

For many of us, LDT is the first place where we’ve found balance. We have more mental, physical, and emotional health here than we’ve ever had working at other companies, and it’s remarkable. A lot of us have athletic backgrounds or interests, which means no one will blink an eye if you suddenly decide to take a break in the middle of the day to go to yoga or do a 5-mile run. If anything, one or two people may ask to join you. And when you’re getting fresh air on a trail run or with your friends at a Tough Mudder on the weekend, it will be hard not to think about our product. How can I improve the user experience? Which feature specs need reframing? Ooh, we should explore a partnership with X!

In this way, work/life integration is a more appropriate value for us at Let’s Do This. We are an early stage startup who recently raised a Series A, and we couldn’t be more excited to realize our vision for the future. We pride ourselves on having the same work ethic and discipline that elite athletes do and would be sad if work and life had to be two separate things. If you’re looking for a job to clock in and out of, don’t come here. But if you want the camaraderie of a team in a competitive sport and want to work alongside other passionate, focused, and determined team members, please reach out – we’d love to talk to you!

You can reach out to Marc, our Head of Engineering, at [email protected].

Early-stage startups are often associated with crazy working hours – that is not the case for us.

We believe engineers do their best work with balance and consistency. We offer flexibility in when you work and make sure that everyone's workload is manageable so that you're not thinking about work once you've signed off for the day. Our on-call rotations are pretty quiet because we go the extra mile to invest in the quality of our platform.

“I thought the startup life would demand hours of my time and folks would be pinging me on weekends and nights. It’s actually quite the opposite,” says David Liu, one of our software engineers.

Having a healthy mind is just as important as having a healthy body. That's why we give engineers a monthly fitness allowance and a wellness allowance.

We bring our best selves to work.

We have a high degree of trust in one another and each person’s capabilities. So as long as you get your work done, or communicate why you are blocked and ask for help, we don’t care how or where you do your work. We work intensely and effectively during normal working weekday hours, and then leave work to recharge on our own time. Having a balanced life outside of work only benefits the company because we believe this contributes to happy, healthy, productive people and therefore, more productive teams.

People are not expected to work weekends unless there is an emergency, hours are flexible able to accommodate child care needs and we are all free to choose where we work from. That said, we try to keep as many hours overlapping with the team as possible in order to facilitate real-time collaboration.

Outside of work, people love being in the great outdoors, traveling to places near and far, eating delicious food, spending time with family, playing music and playing sports. We love staying active, snowboarding, playing badminton, cycling, surfing, and hiking. Not only do we love food, but some of us also really enjoy cooking it! We have supportive and growing families who motivate us and help us to be our best selves. They play an important role in making us successful as a company and as a team.

Whatever helps you recharge, we want you to have the time and space to do it. It is truly the best way to drive creativity, collaboration, and productivity in your work!