Pros
* Rippling consistently has proven that they reward self-driven, motivated, high-achievers. I have seen them reward those who do exceptionally * Rippling is continually growing so the financial and career incentives are there. Our financials are good to the point where we continually hire. This means new employees are joining which leads to more mentorship and growth opportunities for pre-existing employees * C-suite is very very transparent. Every all hands we discuss things plaguing their minds, the breakdown of the financials from the previous month, etc. Every week if feels like there is either a Q&A session with the CTO, CEO, or an all-hands * The technical bar is continually improving. When I first joined it was pretty bad, but since the new CTO (Albert) it has improved quite considerably. Eng bandwidth is being dedicated to the developer experience and tools/technologies. Initiatives are being created to grow and support engineers in every stage of their careers. * Engineers tend to be low-ego individuals. Most engineers will help you with your work, explain concepts, triage/debug with you, etc. Everyone helps out and contributes to codebases without making it bureaucratic. Note that there are a very small number of tenured engineers that have a higher ego but for the most part they are far and few between. * Rippling focuses on execution and outcome. This is good and bad depending on your idea. At the end of the day we are trying to increase the market share. Whether you are on infra, developer experience, a new product, etc. we are here to make the company more money. Prioritization needs to take place and we run lean and can deliver customer value. This means we can't do every passion project but really drives us to make the best decisions possible for the company. * Pro and con: C-suite has brought up multiple times that we are more like a sports team. We are trying to hire the best to succeed. We will reward top performers and let go folks who don't really meet the bar we need them to operate at. There is no lie about us "being a family". That being said, you can tell that the CEO does really care about making sure layoffs don't happen under his watch (if he can prevent it). I have even heard in the early days that an engineer forgot to do their benefits election and will have to pay a high premium for insurance. Instead of saying "sucks", the CEO gave a one-time bonus to help mitigate the mess-up. This likely won't happen to anyone else since we are too big, but goes to show the character of the CEO * Leadership is very active and dives deep. They will understand the product, problem, technical solutions, etc. and will be active owners and champions. The technical caliber and depth is incredibly impressive. * Leadership is very open to feedback. I personally have brought up issues multiple times and was never afraid of any retribution or similar. We are all able to come to the table, say our piece, understand one another, and work towards a solution
Kontras
* Engineering teams vary wildly in work-life-balance. Some teams have figured this out and have enough people where everything isn't always on fire. Other teams are drowning and are working intense hours. Talking to the team members to understand the team culture is important * Roadmaps can change suddenly due to new priorities or requests from management/CEO. Some new priorities make sense for the team to tackle and others do not. Depending on how persistent C-suite is and how good your PM is this may cause a lot of thrash or not as much thrash. * Rippling doesn't have a formal way to train up first-time managers. This can cause various approaches to management within the same org. * Rippling would hire startup founders to create new products. Some have not followed standard best practices in industry which has led to not great implementation patterns/decisions. Some of these patterns still plague teams to this day. * From what I can tell, Rippling engineering has only just started focusing on DEI initiatives to hire candidates with a diverse background. * Platform and product teams don't interact as closely as they should when defining new capabilities. It tends to fall flat and becomes a burden for each team to actually support and integrate with one another. * [Minor] There is no 401K match. Even at the most frugal companies you have a 401K match. Even at random startups, you have a 401K match. Most people who hear that we don't are shocked.