We believe all engineers should have self-driven mindsets – regardless of experience level.

Maintaining a learning, self-driven mindset is crucial to being a good engineer – whether you're new or have 10+ years of experience. When you join a new company, you will be working in an unfamiliar codebase. Once you settle in, you’ll be solving problems that don’t yet have solutions.

When you become an Asana engineer, you’re paired with an onboarding mentor, who will make sure you can ramp up quickly. You’ll have responsibility for your own growth and be empowered to become a better engineer.

At Asana, engineers encourage each other to continually look for new areas of expertise for growth and development. Opportunities like our quarterly hackathons allow you to jump into unfamiliar parts of the codebase, work with new people, and learn new skills.

We want to challenge you to do great things, fast and will support your unique areas of growth.

We’re in a phase of fast growth where change is a constant and every day brings new problems to solve and new opportunities for you to make an impact. Your manager, colleagues, and leaders will trust you to move work forward, make decisions, and drive impact.

Since we believe career growth isn’t linear, and that everyone has a unique path, our programs are inherently designed to support multiple directions and areas of growth. Our goal is to have a supportive environment that challenges you to do great things, fast, while practicing mindfulness as we grow and scale. In turn, we see this as the best way to set you up for success.

Here are some of the ways we ensure that every Asana engineer is constantly learning and growing:

• Constant new opportunities: Asana is growing quickly, so we constantly need people to take on new responsibilities, with support of their peers and other engineering leaders. When a new opportunity becomes available, we make sure every engineer knows about it and has a chance to apply.
• Open engineering culture: The Asana product makes it easy to share information and collaborate, and our engineering culture aspires to do the same. Engineers on different teams have many opportunities to work together, and internal transfers are encouraged.
• Areas of Responsibility: Every employee at Asana is empowered to take on big responsibilities that directly impact our success as a company. Areas of Responsibility (AoRs) are distributed among the greater team, and allow individuals to take on projects and initiatives they’re passionate about that might otherwise be outside of their typical day-to-day.
• Mentorship embedded in our culture: You’ll have a mentor by your side to guide you through the onboarding process from day one. Our Engineering team pairs every team member with a mentor throughout their Asana journey to help them navigate their growth and development.
• Free executive and life coaching: Every employee can choose from experienced, professional coaches and get six free sessions per year, or nine sessions for people managers.
• Mental health benefits: Asana cares deeply about you and wants to support you and your family through any work- or life-related stressors. You will have access to a platform that provides sessions with certified coaches and therapists as well as digital programming and audio therapy.
• Conscious Leadership Group training: Conscious Leadership provides us with a shared language and philosophy around how we as individuals show up to work every day. All Asana team members are invited to participate in CLG training.
• Manager training programs: Investing in managers is critical to supporting every employee’s growth and development. Managers have access to Outstanding Manager Bootcamp courses year-round, as well as several guides and resources, to ensure they are building their leadership skills and setting their team up for success.
• Open source: Engineers at Asana have been contributing to open-source software since the company was founded. Our community of Engineers are focused on fostering constant co-creation and collaboration.

There’s more than one way to grow your career here.

At Academia, you don’t have to give up your individual contributor role to progress your career. In fact, we offer three different tracks for engineers: tech lead, manager, and individual contributor (IC). Not every engineer wants to manage people, and we don’t think you have to in order to progress in your career. You may also want to manage and make technical decisions for a project, or simply execute on and write code. Whatever path speaks to you most, we support.

Team members who have been with us for four years can take advantage of six weeks of fully paid sabbatical leave! Zach, our Director of Product Management, traveled throughout the Middle East and Europe, spending a couple weeks in Egypt, Israel and Palestine, and Italy. Stuart spent three weeks in Yosemite and three weeks at the beach, and Kari, our Head of People Operations, is planning to explore national parks across the US this summer while visiting friends and family along the way.

Academia is also a great place for those looking to grow their families. New parents are supported with eight weeks of paid bonding parental leave, plus eight weeks of birth parent leave. Last by not least, we also offer an annual learning stipend of $2,000 for you to use toward your professional development. This could include anything from attending a conference or class, to buying books (our library at our San Francisco office was a popular place in pre-pandemic times).

We live and breathe personal development. We make that commitment to both our employees and our users.

Our company mission is to drive personal growth and development, and we start with ourselves. Our approach is heavily rooted in personalized coaching, which means that every employee at BetterUp gets their own coach, along with one additional coach for a friend or family member to use. You can connect with as many specialists as you need on a variety of topics ranging from nutrition and sleep to parenting, sales performance or navigating uncertainty, just to name a few. Everyone at BetterUp also has access to the same resources, books, and training that we provide for our customers.

When you join BetterUp, you'll go through our extensive onboarding process which helps every employee understand how the various gears of our business work together. It's important that everyone at the company has full context about our mission, vision, and ongoing projects so that they can think critically about their own job. Each new engineer is also paired with an experienced mentor in order to provide a personal touchpoint as they ramp up on our systems and processes.

Personal development is so important to us that we also periodically offer mindset and emotional intelligence training from experts in the field throughout the year as well as a $1000 personal learning stipend that can be used for conferences, books, classes, etc. The most unique benefit we offer are five “inner work” days each year for each person to take a step back, and reflect on their work and journey.

From a management perspective, we’re strong believers in continuous feedback to help drive professional development. We have weekly 1-on-1s along with quarterly touchpoints to obtain feedback from team members around strengths and opportunities for improvement. These touchpoints are focused solely on helping you improve your effectiveness in craft and at BetterUp. They are separate from conversations about compensation and overall performance.

Your career trajectory isn’t limited to two tracks at DuckDuckGo.

Ensuring our team members feel empowered to grow and challenge themselves on a daily basis is core to how we operate. One way we do this is by offering every team member an annual budget of $1250 to invest in their professional development. It can be spent on virtual and in-person courses or lectures, books and other paid learning materials, or conference attendance (including necessary travel expenses). We also give every team member a dedicated Career Advisor, who serves as a guide to help you develop your strengths, identify your motivations, understand your weaknesses, and set goals. Weekly 1-on-1s with your Career Advisor ensure you’re tracking toward these goals.

You may have had to give up your individual contributor role to take on a management position or enter leadership at previous companies, but not here. At DuckDuckGo, we don’t believe leadership roles are effective when limited to two tracks. We have many different types of leaders and possible combinations of leadership roles, so you can grow your career in a way that aligns best with you personally. For example, while we all lead projects, you can seek additional leadership roles by DRI-ing an objective (see Start-to-Finish Ownership below), owning a unique product area, developing and maintaining a new internal process, seeking career, project, or objective advisory roles, and much more.

There are written expectations for all of these roles, too, so it’s always clear what you’re responsible for and what you need to do to get promoted. What’s more, our review process doesn’t rely on single decision-makers. When changes to professional levels are considered (every nine months), your peers are consulted. This way the collaborators, stakeholders, and advisors you’ve worked with can directly speak to your work and its impact. We also actively encourage our engineers to work on projects across platforms in order to widen their skill set and eventually move into new functional areas (if they wish to do so).

When it comes to personal growth, we put our money where our mouth is with bi-monthly executive coaching.

We commit to each and every one of our team member’s personal growth, and this extends beyond traditional professional development. For example, we have an executive coach on retainer for full-time teammates who would like bi-monthly coaching (or they can also choose to work with their own executive coach). We also have 360 performance reviews every six weeks (ask us why!), book club, stipends for conferences and/or training, home office setup reimbursement, and the list continues to grow!

Each quarter, our teammates build individual objectives and measurable goals (OMGs) – which other orgs sometimes call ‘OKRs’ – that align with both professional and personal values. On the professional side, each teammate works with their group to build out their own goals and KPIs (e.g., engineering, product, operations, research team) for the quarter. We also support teammates to build personal OMGs, and we regularly check in with teammates during their 1:1s, which they set with their team leads or CEO every week. (Want more examples of OMGs? We are inspired by the Measure What Matters framework.)

Although our teammates live across the globe, we come together regularly. This has of course shifted during COVID-19, though we plan to continue this tradition when it’s safe to do so.

We have a variety of programs in place that are dedicated to fostering learning.

Change.university is Change.org’s peer-to-peer learning program. It creates an opportunity for Changers to teach and learn skills from one another. Everyone is welcomed and encouraged to join. Additionally, all new hires join a group of other Change.org newbies to go through a month-long onboarding process. As part of this process, everyone in the group from around the world gathers together for a one-week retreat, called Generations. It’s a time and a space for the new team members to get to know each other and learn more about Change.org from our leaders. While this paused due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve been able to implement it virtually (with monthly hangouts for each cohort) and we’re looking forward to gathering again in-person as soon as it’s safe to do so.

Part of personal growth and development here at Change.org is creating an environment where we’re not afraid to try new ways of doing things. That means our culture allows space for failure. To get the best end result, we’re big on testing and learning from what doesn’t work. An example of this can be seen in product development – we use both Optimizely and bandit algorithms for feature testing before deploys. Making mistakes is part of human nature, but we like to take the opportunity to grow from it in a way that is safe and comfortable for everyone involved.

Don’t be surprised if you get pulled in for a brainstorming meeting to generate ideas on new products, global communication across offices, or the next book club book.

We want you to become the best version of yourself both professionally and personally. How can we support that?

We are a team of lifelong learners. Across the board, we seek to learn, both to better ourselves and also sometimes just for the sake of learning. We are curious people who ask a lot of questions! Because of this, we’ve built personal and professional growth into the fabric of the company.

We help each other grow by giving and receiving the gift of feedback across the board – and we like working with people who share our love of thoughtful feedback. This is especially important in code reviews. We have a team that’s focused on getting to the right solution – not on being right – and we enjoy collaborating with others who share that focus. We don’t do egos. We’re all here because we want to make the product (and ourselves) as good as it can be.

We hold company-wide retrospectives every quarter to reflect on how we did as a team, what our big wins were, what could’ve been stronger, and where we can collectively support each other to improve in the future. We also host monthly retrospectives as an engineering team. We use these inputs to try to improve our environment and allow our teammates to do their best work.

We are all also constantly scouring the interwebs to bring the best food for thought to one another in Slack – sharing articles, visuals, music, art, food, memes, and anything/everything else that might be interesting or inspiring. In addition, we cover the membership cost to any museum on the planet, to help you engage in the world beyond.

We deeply understand that everyone has a different idea of what growth looks like – maybe it’s going from an individual contributor to a manager, or maybe it’s taking on increasingly complex and challenging projects. Or, maybe it’s something else entirely. Universe is ever evolving and we are committed to making sure our team members are also ever evolving in life and in work. We are tackling a gigantic undertaking, which means opportunities to expand in every direction – there’s always more to do together, and that’s really exciting.

We focus on careers, not jobs.

As a new hire, you will start off by working with your manager to determine which areas you want to grow: technical mastery, bias to ship, mentorship and collaboration, systemization and automation. Do you want to become a React expert? How about leading projects to deal with potential scammers via understanding message intent or devising some interesting application beyond Bayesian classification? We will match you with projects that align with both your personal career goals and the business objectives for the team. We also provide stipends for conference attendance and online courses.

We have a strong track record of hiring engineers who find growth in their career here.

During our interview process, we do our best to assess where someone's skills currently are, but more importantly, where we think they can go (aka aptitude). By aligning someone’s interests with the needs of the business, our engineers often work on things that are new to them and learn along the way.

We have annual professional development stipends, which folks can use to attend conferences or pursue further education in any topic of interest. We also have both organic mentorship and a formalized interdepartmental mentorship program that we started at the end of 2019. Research informs us that organic mentorships are for “people who remind me of myself” and can be inherently exclusive. Furthermore, approaching someone to ask for mentorship can be daunting for someone new in their career, so this program also helps overcome such fears. Our mentorship program is opt-in only and pairs our leaders with mentees to try to align both interests and different business units. We look forward to iterating on our program throughout our initial cohorts.

Finally, our engineers have ample opportunity to teach and learn from one another beyond any mentorship relationship. We have ~35 engineers who are split into smaller product-aligned teams (i.e. mobile, integrations, web app). Each team has a dedicated product manager, works directly with designers, and has high accountability, ownership, and visibility.

We believe learning never stops.

Despite coming from various backgrounds, everyone at Seesaw shares one thing in common: we all love learning. Not only is our product dedicated to enhancing learning, but we are also committed to growth and development as individuals and as a team.

A great example of how we demonstrate personal development is through our internship program for individuals pursuing a career in engineering. Unlike most companies where internship programs are largely run by engineering managers, our engineers drive Seesaw’s entire process from start to finish. It is a great opportunity for engineers (who may not have experience with hiring or managing) to identify which projects the interns work on, design appropriate interview questions, shadow one another during interviews, and ultimately make the decision about which applicants to extend offers. Independent contributors (ICs) get the chance to onboard and manage interns, and everyone gains a deeper understanding of what recruiting and hiring entails. While we are only in our third year, we’ve found this unique, engineering-driven internship program to be successful for everyone involved and we plan to continue evolving the program.

To further support professional development, we also offer educational stipends ($500 per year), for all Seesaw employees. In the past, folks have used their stipends to attend conferences, take online courses, or purchase books. We also take advantage of how knowledgeable our colleagues are and regularly host Lunch and Learns where team members can lead a presentation or discussion around a topic of their choice. Recent examples have included Understanding Equity and Stock Options, Advocacy (how to be an advocate for others), and Owning Your Career Growth.

We’re looking for people who don’t just want to simply climb the ladder, but are passionate about how they’re growing and developing. If that sounds like you, we highly recommend you learn more about how Seesaw enables K-12 students to better engage with both their teachers and parents and also learn more about the team behind it.

Constant learning is baked into our culture and calendar.

We help each other grow personally and professionally every week, anchored by Feedback Fridays. We each have 2-3 core personal goals at any given time, and every Friday we share open and honest feedback on what we’ve seen from our teammates – we aim for 1 ‘Plus’ (good work) and 1 Delta (way to improve) per person each week.

There is no hierarchy, no judgement, and no evaluation. This session is purely about helping each other constantly improve and maintaining a team culture focused on growth rather than ego.

Everyone on the team has budget each year for learning and education, as well as for travel to conferences, engaging with the community, and building leadership in a domain.

The process is the product.

We’re committed to bringing on the best talent and fostering employee growth internally. Yes, our postings are “jobs,” but we want them to be in the bigger landscape of a career. To that end, we’ll talk about performance plans as early as the interview and hiring process and be explicit in setting expectations.

Our feedback structures are designed to make sure we’re hearing from you regularly. In addition to stand-ups and weekly all-hands, you can expect weekly or biweekly 1-on-1s to ensure you’re tracking toward your personal and professional goals. More formal 360 reviews via Lattice also allow for feedback in all directions.

As co-founders, we (Fouad Matin and Dan Gillespie) bring a vast amount of experience. Fouad worked on data infrastructure at Segment (he also has experience in recruiting) and Dan was the first non-Googler to manage a Kubernetes release. While our backgrounds are unique, both of us have worked at companies where we felt a lack of empowerment. We’re now determined to make sure that as Indent grows, not only is every employee able to participate, but they are also actively listened to with the same respect as a founder.

Trade-offs: We’d rather get policies in place for SOC 2 that enable us to build deeper trust with our customers than just race to tack on new features. We believe that sustainable progress is only possible through a sustainable process.

Everyone learns a little bit differently, and we’re always learning on the side.

At Monograph we provide a wide range of ways to further your growth: educational stipends (up to $1,000 per year), regular tech talks (Coffee+Cookie+Code), Jam Sessions where we build something together, or our favorite Show-n-Tell where you can showcase your latest side project.

Employers typically discourage their employees from working on side projects, or at least it seems as if people are shy to share this information with their managers and coworkers. The fact is Monograph started as a side project, so of course we encourage you to work on something on the side!

A few side projects from our team:

• So Hydrated - Internal tool to track our hydration challenge (Dan)
• Architecture Dictionary (Daniel)
• Raised Water Research (Pete)
• Lorem Ipsum (Alex)
• CSS Gradient (Moe)

Despite all of the great resources we do provide, the reality is we can’t give you everything you need professionally. With a 4-day workweek, our team uses some of their extra time off to level-up in other ways, whether that’s sitting on leadership boards, taking classes, prototyping a new technology, or going on long hikes to reset mentally.

Personal development is one of our core values and we integrate into everything we do.

As a small team, we really encourage people to stretch themselves and try new things. More importantly, we provide opportunities for you to do so without fear of reprisal or reprimand. For example, Sean expressed an interest to learn Golang and to take on increasingly bigger projects to stretch his architectural design skills. We said, “Of course!” This is also what we told Steph when she said that she wanted to design and implement a feature end-to-end.

Despite being a small team, we’ve set aside a budget for leadership training, coaching, and Learning and Development. We also provide a therapy benefit to all of our team members, and provide peer learning and coaching. Everyone at Range is encouraged to choose a coach (another person at the company) who can help them with their personal growth goals. Coaches set up regular 1:1s and run a periodic forward-looking feedback process, though each coaching relationship is defined by the 2 individuals. Coaches can be switched up at any time (for example, if your goals for growth shift or once you've achieved the milestone you set out).

The first line of our creed: “I’ll never stop learning.”

Our continued learning benefit covers a lot of ground. We offer team subscriptions to Treehouse and JavaScript for WordPress and will pay for basically anything else you may want to use to continue to master your craft. (Automatticians recommend a lot of favorite learning tools, too!) We also support language learning, anchored by a video learning program (English, writing, facilitating meetings, and more) on Lingo Live. Whether it’s something bigger like reimbursement for attending events globally, or the little things, like purchasing a book from our extensive recommended reading list, we’ve got you covered.

We’re also proud of Automattic TV, which is full of video series such as Code Like Gold (programming presentations and demos), The People Lab (a speaker series featuring Diversity & Inclusion and HR topics), Flash Talks (short talks we give at Grand Meetups on a range of topics), our regular Town Halls, and more. Automatticians have access to a professional coach and up to 10 coaching sessions per calendar year (16 for team leads).

Learning at Automattic starts with an inclusive hiring process that hopefully removes stress and bias, and helps candidates become familiar with how we work, so you can hit the ground running. Onboarding starts with a friendly welcome and self-introduction to the entire distributed team. You'll then embark on a two-week support rotation to learn about our users and our incredible customer support system, Happiness.

We embrace a two-sided process. Our distributed team and culture need to fit your goals, lifestyle, and values just as much as you fit ours.

It is important to us that every engineer sees their path forward, not only at Rune, but also in their career overall.

Some folks haven't quite figured it out, and that's ok. We try to help by making it very feasible to be able to change teams, change what part of the stack you focus on, and what kind of technology you're exposed to, until something resonates with you.

While we're still on the smaller side, we have an internship program and engage every year with university career fairs. We encourage everyone to participate in the community, and will sponsor engineers to represent the company at public speaking events and in underrepresented communities. We also pair every engineer with a mentor from the senior staff, who helps them advance at their own pace to take on more responsibility and harder projects.

We're tackling some very hard technology at scale and complexity that many other companies aren't facing. That said, if you’ve never worked on these systems before, it’s not a barrier. Rather, we focus on hiring people that are committed to improving and learning the best way to do things, not just the fastest. We teach others how to design architecturally before we ever hit code, how to address scalability both on paper and empirically, how to predict and mitigate failure modes and security concerns, how to think about the infrastructure supporting your code, how to make responsive and interactive data analysis tools in the browser, and how to create mobile applications that are hyper aware of users affected in very different ways by neurological conditions such as movement, depressive, or compulsive disorders. If this sounds interesting to you and you’re excited about learning more, we’d love to hear from you!

Renders are incessantly curious about technology and people.

Two of Render's core personal attributes drive our unified commitment to personal growth: Continuous Learning and Candor with Empathy. We sustain world-class performance by picking up concepts and ideas quickly and as needed. We believe in a growth mindset and in providing an environment where everyone can learn and thrive.

You'll have the opportunity to accelerate your own growth by working at a small startup like ours. We encourage you to try new things and gain experiences unavailable in larger organizations (see our Start-to-Finish Ownership and Safe Environment to Fail sections for more). Here are a few ways we support personal growth:

• We sponsor work-related training, conferences, workshops, and resources. Case in point: 100% of our full-stack engineering team completed the Kubernetes Administrator course and are now certified.
• We follow a highly collaborative process. All projects are well-staffed and deliberately cross-functional to allow collaborative learning – a typical project will involve someone from the full-stack, design, user experience, and support teams.
• We use a lightweight review process. This is true across all stages of our product life cycle – from design documents to code.
• We’re feedback driven. We value taking the time to give each other consistent recognition and feedback through various channels including Slack, team meetings (where we all reflect on the week's highs and lows), and a blameless incident review process.

We provide and support infinite career paths.

As your career evolves with Brex, you will likely take on a variety of roles and responsibilities. You’ll have the opportunity to work with multiple teams, on multiple projects, perhaps in very different domains or in smaller areas of specialty. While the company at large is committed to the personal growth of all its employees, you’ll also be encouraged by your peers. Everyone at Brex should have a way to grow their careers and expand the impact of their work no matter what role they play. Essentially, there is no “right” way to define your career at Brex as we have infinite paths you can take.

When you join Brex, you will have the resources and tools you need to grow your career in whatever way suits you best. Here are just some of the ways in which we support growth at Brex:

• Brex Career Paths: Growing your career at Brex begins with knowing your current role, identifying where you want to go, and defining what success looks like for you whether that’s transitioning into another role, acquiring a new skill, or contributing to a specific type of work. From here, employees chart a path of where they currently are and how they are going to reach their desired outcome. Sometimes this includes the expert track, people management, or something in between.
• Coaching & Mentoring: We provide hands-on experiences via pods or 1-on-1 mentoring focused on employee success, community, diversity & inclusion, and career progression.
• Learning Experiences: Get monthly learning stipends to spend on courses/books, conference ticket expense coverage, and LinkedIn learning! We also host company-wide design review sessions, engineering open houses, and paper readings, which can truly add another dimension to your technical growth. Each option allows you to absorb far more than you would in your day-to-day work.
• Self-Assessments: We lean on introspection to help us grow. Employees have ample resources and tools that help them take charge of their own professional development to build a stronger sense of self-awareness and team connection.

Learn and grow with us!

We wholeheartedly want everyone who joins Cameo to grow and learn during their time with us. There are a number of ways in which people can stretch themselves, too. For example, once a week, we have technical show-and-tell meetings via video conference. Engineers present new tools or techniques they’ve learned or are implementing to help uplevel their team members.

For anyone wanting to engage with the greater engineering community, we are happy to send you to any conference you may be interested in. Some of our team members have even given talks at conferences such as App.js Conf. Career development is important to us which is why we are heavily biased toward promoting from within rather than hiring externally.

We always ask, “What can we do to make you happier?”

We are building something that’s fundamentally new, and in a nascent space that’s rapidly evolving. There’s no playbook for how things should be done, so it’s imperative we remain highly curious, learn continuously, question assumptions, and think from first principles. Insatiable curiosity motivates us both at work and in our daily lives. That’s why one of the fun perks of working here is you can expense any book you’d like (even personal ones). We have socials every two weeks where different people share deep dives and lead discussions around various topics. We’ve done everything from presentations on mental models to bike riding to linguistic relativity, as well as games (e.g. Among Us) and Airbnb Experiences.

We also make it a point to ask in 1-on-1s, “What can we do to make you happier?” Sometimes people are facing something personal and decide to share. Other times it might be work-related (lately the answers seem to hover around needing more help... hint hint, we’re hiring!) In general, we are firm believers in personal happiness, life outside of work, and self-care. Multiple members of our team have families and small children (family first!) and both of our founders are regular meditators (Chandan is currently at 40 minutes/day with a goal to get to a five day silent meditation retreat).

Senior engineers are servant leaders

Angaza believes so strongly in mentorship that we deliberately scale our hiring rate to our mentoring capacity. If we feel we can’t provide the proper support for our engineers to grow into confident and independent colleagues, then we’ll dial back until mentoring bandwidth increases again.

We expect a lot from our senior engineers. Not only must they make strong technical contributions, but they must actively grow the next crop of leaders. In return, senior engineers have the opportunity to hone their own skills, shape the organization, and have significant impact. They spearhead our most challenging projects and they are given wide latitude when doing so.

More broadly, from frequent pairing to our biweekly engineering practicum, Angaza culture is infused with a commitment to helping engineers maximize their rates of personal growth.

We have a variety of programs dedicated to supporting learning.

Every employee gets a $1500 annual budget to use toward professional development – be it workshops, conferences, online courses, or books. We’ve had engineers use their Pro Dev budgets to attend JAMstack Conference and React Rally, take an Intro to Data Science with R Course, or just read up on best practices for Clean Code and Deep Work.

Two of our own key values are at the core of Upstatement’s Mentorship Program: make each other better and hold the highest standard. The program was created to introduce space and time for meaningful “Upsbud” relationships (especially in remote times), as well as informal collaboration and learning.

The Upstatement Speaker Series consists of Friday Talks that happen roughly once a month. Friday Talks inspire us, help us learn, and allow us to build connections with other communities of creative and technical thinkers. Also, they’re wicked fun! You can check out some of our past speakers on our Events page.

On Fridays when we aren’t hosting an outside speaker, we host internal Friday Shares. The topics change, but can include:

• Design shares
• Engineering shares
• Process shares
• Project shares (of in-progress or recently completed work)
• “Town Halls” on special studio topics

We embrace a growth mindset which is exemplified by our core value: “Learn. Grow. Repeat.”

Handshake is an education technology company, so it’s only natural that one of our core company values is “Learn. Grow. Repeat.” In order to build an amazing team that is relentlessly curious and constantly striving to excel, we have to invest in each individual’s personal growth. To do so, we provide support for learning both internally and externally.

Within the company, we have Handshake Academy courses that both new hires and veterans can attend including everything from “Intro to Elasticsearch” to “How to Story Point.” These courses cover all aspects of the company, from engineering, to sales, to design. For the engineering team, we heavily encourage pair programming, and have weekly Lunch & Learns where engineers present on learnings and new technologies. This could be a talk on a new idea for how to write automated tests or how to practice nonviolent communication.

What’s more, each new hire is paired with two Onboarding Buddies for their first month at Handshake. The buddies come from across the organization and are responsible for helping new hires make the most of life at Handshake. Though the buddy program eventually ends, we continue to encourage cross-team pollination. For example, we have bi-weekly #donuts, where each person across the company is randomly matched with someone else for coffee. This is a great opportunity for personal growth since employees can learn more from one another, develop relationships outside their immediate team, and feel more connected to the Handshake community.

For external learning opportunities, we provide a generous annual conference stipend ($1,500) and encourage conference attendees to write up their takeaways and share them with the team. We also have a partnership with “Udemy for Business” for employees to take free classes at their own pace on topics ranging from data science and machine learning, to finance and business development.

We invest in people on an individual level.

As a team, we work across a broad swath of products and technologies. Not only does this help us solve problems holistically, but it’s also a great opportunity for individual growth. You’re encouraged to get your hands dirty and try new things and there are endless ways to do so. For instance, everyone is fullstack here so if you’ve been interested in trying a new part of the stack, we fully support that. As one engineer puts it, “I've never felt looked down upon or silly for asking a question, which is the reason why I've been able to grow so much.”

Another way we support personal growth is by giving every engineer who joins our team a mentor, someone who is usually on the same team as you and who shares a similar skillset. In conjunction with your manager, your mentor equips you with the core knowledge you need to be successful and ensures milestones are met to foster your growth.

Whether you prefer to be an IC, technical lead, or manager, we offer different career paths. We try to make sure we get a sense of what you envision for your career and let you work on projects that leverage those skills. We have a culture of coaching and sharing learnings, but push people to spread their wings and learn by doing as well.

Talk openly about your goals. We support you.

At Dark, we have career switchers, people who are self-taught, and those looking to move into leadership roles. We’re committed to supporting all of those situations for our employees, and will do whatever we can to help you grow as an engineer.

By actively practicing feedback and having a bias toward transparency, we do our best to align each individual’s personal and professional goals with the goals of the business. In 1-1s you’ll talk about your future goals and the skills/experiences you might need to get there. When we do more aggregate reviews (like the 30/60/90 or when asked), we provide specific insights and quotes from the rest of the team. As a collective, our team members have a wide variety of skills and experience, so one of the most valuable sources for growth is the person sitting next to you. Thus far, we’ve all become more well-rounded as we learn from each other and are able to get insight into other pieces of the company.

We also:

• Buy whatever books you need.
• Purchase meetup tickets.
• Pay for one professional development conference per year.
• Invite industry guests and hire all-team workshops for specific areas (upcoming: Distributed Systems).

We have a long-term commitment to new learning and every new hire gets a buddy and mentor.

We’re a very experienced team, much more so than the average startup, and we all regularly take on new roles and learn from each other. We’re committed to personal growth out of necessity, and also because we love it in our own lives. On a small, start-up team, you need people willing to try everything, and the team needs to create a safe place for people to try new things. We couldn’t get everything done any other way.

When you first join our team, you’ll be matched up with at least one buddy based on what we learn about you during our hiring and onboarding process. New employees meet one-on-one with their buddy every week. These meetings are just to run through the events of the day/week, and are often taken on short zoom calls.

You’ll have a direct impact on real-world problems, starting day one.

Managers have frequent 1:1s with direct reports to ensure you’re supported and tracking toward the goals you’ve set. “At Symbio, I’m regularly asked about what I’m looking for, where I see myself, and what roles I would like to be a part of,” says Jackie. There’s a lot of opportunity for movement within the company.

Because we value a growth mindset, we offer a $2,500 annual ‘Learning and Development’ stipend, which you can use on things like conferences, professional certifications, books, or even your university degree. For example, Denise achieved her SHRM-CP with Symbio Support, Rachel has explored training options for Docker, and William is working with a leadership coach.

Unlike many other startups, we’re a place where you can actually see your software controlling hardware in a production manufacturing environment. It’s you that writes the code, not somebody two or three levels above you, or an entire team. Hundreds of thousands of cars on the road today were assembled using code we shipped to production, meaning you have a tangible impact starting day one.

We have a thoughtful employee development program called GustoFIED, or Gusto Feedback, Impact, Engagement, and Development.

Our bi-annual performance-review is an opportunity to have a very open, honest, and focused discussion on strengths and areas of development. It’s a 360-degree feedback process, which consists of a self-reflection, peer-feedback, and a follow-up 1:1 conversation with your manager. GustoFIED is not just a reflection of previous work - we also use this as a time to look forward and help Gusties develop both professionally and personally.

Our engineers also have a $1,500 annual learning and development budget. Engineers have attended classes or workshops, worked in new parts of our stack, and attended conferences. Many of our engineers have even been featured in media and at technology conferences. At Gusto, personal growth isn’t just something we think about twice a year with GustoFIED — it’s every day.

At the core of Peergrade is a belief that the best way to learn is through mentorship, feedback, and by teaching others.

We incorporate a lot of opportunities for collaboration, code review and you will work very closely with the other members of the team. We always try to push developers with harder challenges and couple it with support from our CTO and others on the team. Through our performance reviews and 1-on-1’s we keep track of your growth and help you get to where you want to be, both in the short term and the long term. Not everyone wants to or is supposed to become management, so we try to accommodate for independent contributors too. The most important person for defining the growth trajectory of your career is yourself, and we are there to support you.

The growth of the company is directly correlated with every Novan’s growth.

Novans can leverage their $1500 professional development budget for personal growth. For example, Jaime used a part of his budget to attend JSConf in Hawaii! Nova also invests in professional events, tools, and resources and provides access to an extensive network you can tap into. You can leverage our network by having matcha 1:1s with peers and mentors or joining community events, where we've met many new friends, accelerated our professional growth, and discussed hot topics.

In the spirit of being an international company serving an international community, Nova encourages employees to take a vacation and explore the world with our anniversary gift. On your Nova anniversary, you’ll get a roundtrip ticket to anywhere in the world; we believe traveling can be one of the best ways to grow as a person, (emotionally, spiritually, and professionally) through being exposed to how different people in the world live and seeing things. People have used their anniversary flights to visit the Maldives, Thailand, New Zealand, and Greece, just to name a few destinations!

You can see a full list of our benefits here.

Structured career development starts on day one.

At Minerva Project, we place a strong emphasis on professional development. This begins with a structured 90-day onboarding, which includes a plan for shipping code during week one. By day 90, you’ll have a comfortable foothold on one (or more) of the products outlined in your professional development goals and will be working with your manager to line those up with pods and projects.

The relationship with your manager is a two-way street. You should feel comfortable to regularly discuss potential areas for growth so your manager can advocate for you to take on appropriate stretch projects. You and your manager will regularly revisit your professional development goals. Just like we split product planning into multiple chunks during the year, we have multiple layers of professional development from high level year long goals to per project initiatives to make clear how your efforts at Minerva will grow your career.

We also have a budget to expense any technical book needed to help you learn more and a tuition assistance program of $3K per year for professional development events such as conferences, trainings, and workshops. For example, our teammates have been involved with Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC), PyCon, and more. We also run internal book clubs and workshops, with recent examples including book clubs on The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier and Switch by Dan and Chip Heath, and an introduction to Docker and Kubernetes workshop.

Staff and faculty at our all-company event in 2019.

We have amazing resources to help all of our people continue to grow.

As a starter, all of our training materials and workshops are tailor-made. Our onboardings are not only customized to New Relic, but also for the specific department you’re joining. (People Ops, Sales, Technical teams all have their own training material.) For those of us who have been in the industry for many years (or in some cases, decades), we were all blown away by the amount and quality of content that helps new hires ramp up at New Relic.

You’re also assigned to a buddy when you get hired. Buddies have a whole list of things to work with you on to help you get oriented: tours of our nap rooms, how to schedule an appointment with one of our in-office masseuses, or going over our rooftop yoga schedule. There are also so many tools available for Rookie Relics (as we call them) to help you understand how we do sprint planning, write a good story, and find out what team someone is on (or what a team does!).

Once you’re situated, there continues to be many opportunities for growth. So many, in fact, that you probably won’t have enough time to take advantage of everything that’s offered to you! Even when the unexpected happens (like with COVID-19), we make a big effort to support one another and stay connected as a team.

It’s important that we’re all continuously improving.

As a small team in a high-growth business environment, it’s important that everyone on the team is bettering themselves both in and out of the office. A mentally intense workday should be complemented by recharging outside the office, too. That’s why we provide a monthly wellness stipend ($50) to be spent however you’d like (e.g. gym, fitness classes, meditation). We also provide a monthly education stipend ($25) for continuous learning to be used on books or courses. And if there is a conference or seminar that’s relevant to what you’re working on – we’ll cover the cost!

Similarly, we don’t want getting to and from work to be stressful, which is why we provide monthly commuting benefits ($100) so you only start sweating once you get to that fitness class ;) To round it out, we also provide $100 in points every month on your Point card.

And in case there were any questions, we offer competitive salary and stock options and full health benefits (medical, dental, and vision).

The question is not if you will grow at Covariant, but how you will grow.

We're tackling a problem that has no known solutions and no best practices, which means it isn’t even possible for us to hire someone who already has all of the necessary knowledge. Therefore, we have to embrace the idea that our very success as a business depends on our ability to learn and grow, both as individuals and as a team.

At Covariant, it’s not about how much you know, but rather how much you are willing to learn. We all strive to become better versions of ourselves every day, and more importantly, we all see it as our responsibility to help our colleagues do the same. Domain experts host discussions and organize reading groups around topics they have a deep understanding in – from machine learning to goal setting – in order to help others expand their skill sets. Maximilian Sieb started a discussion group to get people up to speed in the basic methodologies related to computer vision (and more advanced topics that specifically relate to what we do at Covariant) and reported “how exciting it is to see people with no prior background in computer vision come up with innovative ideas only a few meetings in!”

We help each other break out of our comfort zones and encourage one another to take on tasks we're interested in, even when they fall outside of our wheelhouse. Our strong internal support network and our desire to uplevel the people around us fosters an atmosphere where everyone feels encouraged to take on new tasks without ever being siloed.

Grow with us.

Despite being a small team, we invest heavily in a thorough 30-60-90 review process for new hires. We want everyone who joins our team to set goals and have a clear plan for how their first three months at Sparrow will go. We also do regular 360 reviews on Lattice. They’re not tied to compensation, but do focus on areas of growth and how you can level up. We take our onboarding and training very seriously! As a remote-first company, we rely heavily on written documentation and make sure to provide new hires with written training material around feedback (i.e. learning to identify switch tracking in difficult conversations) and opportunities to discuss with others in their onboarding cohort.

We also have book clubs that tend to focus on skills we’re all interested in learning more about. Most recently, we’ve been reading books about management. We provide materials and create time for us to discuss what we’ve read altogether. But professional growth is just one half of it. We also learn a lot from working with one another. Once a week, we have Weekly Tea(m) Time on Wednesdays. We invite five people together, have three questions (as prompts), and get to know one another through conversation. Our team members come from a wide variety of backgrounds (ranging from massage therapy to environmental law) and we get to learn a lot from one another, too. You can also learn about our favorite TV shows, weekend activities, and what inspired us to join Sparrow on our blog, where we spotlight a different person each Tuesday.

Finally, we encourage folks to have work/life balance while also maximizing overlapping hours with team members. As a distributed team spread across nearly a dozen different states in the United States, we all tend to work ~9:30am to 5:30pm in our respective time zones. This way, everyone can spend time with their families, friends, or doing whatever else they want to do outside of work!

We’re invested in seeing engineers grow professionally and personally.

As a company, we want to make sure everyone joining our team has the ability to personally and professionally grow in their roles over time. When you join PicnicHealth, we start with a 30- and 90-day onboarding and goal setting plan – setting clear goals and expectations with you and your team. We have bi-annual performance reviews to reflect on your contributions, impact, and growth, as well as opportunities for improvement. Working with your manager, you’ll set forward-looking goals aligned with upcoming projects and interests. We want to make sure you’re engaged with the work you’re doing and continuously learning new skills.

We also provide external opportunities to promote your growth, including life coaching, flexible work arrangements (see above), and accommodating different working styles to understand how you get work done best while supporting your work life balance.

We’re intentional about helping team members grow within the company.

What differentiates us from many other early-stage startups is the strong emphasis we place on seeking to continually better ourselves. Since the beginning, we’ve been focused on making sure the engineering team has structure around our internal leveling processes. We have structure and expectations in place for every role that are clearly communicated and used to make sure we’re offering equitable compensation. As a company, we also have bi-annual professional development sessions, which includes a combination of 360 feedback, self-reflection, and manager review. It’s safe to say we have an internal growth mindset and want managers to advocate for their direct reports and help them develop the skills they need to be successful.

As an engineer on the team, you’ll get a lot of exposure to other parts of the business. You can expect to collaborate closely with the product and operations teams and gain insight into how the business is being run and how we think about things strategically. If this sounds like a good fit, we’d love to hear from you!