A Fun, Mission-Driven Company - Anonymous employee CouchSurfing Employee Review

Nothing gets more bad reviews than a clean sweep of a team of developers who are highly paid yet don't complete projects on time, take off work mid-week to pick up their new BMW despite a project that is trailing a month behind, and spend their time creating conspiracy theories about their boss. I'm confident the CEO has better things to do with his time than spy on us through our Nest cams, installed to provide safety for the employees -- considering we are located in the Mission District. Check out the website MissionLocal.org if you'd prefer to have the cameras removed. I have been at CouchSurfing over 2 years, and the management team has met my expectations for a small tech company. They aren't looking to micro-manage, and they want to see employees who can manage a lot of work and who aren't averse to self-directed learning. The management is willing to take risks based on the team's input, if the input is there. The CEO, Patrick, has plenty of experience working for successful tech companies. To the other reviewers' point that he has a finance background, I think they can understand that in this game, time is money and the management team would obviously expect those they compensate to keep that fact in the forefront of their project management. The recent series of reviews are too similarly written to be taken seriously. Show up for work with ingenuity and this is a great place to work. Working for CouchSurfing is a unique opportunity and it provides me with chances to advance my skillset.

If you want a job where you go to work and are handed a to-do list, this isn't the job for you. If you want your value as an employee to be determined exclusively by something other than the work you are paid to produce, then this isn't the place for you.

I really love the people I work with. The other engineers are extremely talented and I learn from them every single day. The work is challenging and I constantly feel like I'm pushing the limits of my abilities and growing professionally as a result. The swings in the office are a great place to meditate on a hard problem you're chewing on, and if that doesn't do it surely a game of ping pong will. Most people in the office have a standing desk and we also have a 'living room' full of couches, so you never have to sit at the same boring desk day after day. We've started doing Tech Talk Tuesdays twice a month where someone presents a new language/framework/concept during lunch. The food is great. Like most people here, our chef is really, really good at what he does.

I love my work so much, that sometimes its hard to balance out other parts of my life. I find myself staying up through the night and hacking gleefully away on weekends to nail the projects I'm working on. Let me be completely clear: This is NOT because I feel pressure from management to work a lot. Its because the management creates an environment where the engineers are encouraged to build stuff, and to take pride in what you've built. The work-life balance thing is important though, so I guess this is a Con. But I can think of worse problems to have.