Growing pains - Anonymous employee Everwise Employee Review

While it's true that Everwise waited too long to address some important structural problems, I’m proud to say that Everwise has been through an incredible transformation over the past couple of months. The leadership team has changed significantly, the software-oriented product strategy is clear and being executed by an incredible Head of Product, and the whole company finally operates as a team. Most importantly, the company is doing well, we're able to retain great talent, the market opportunity is big and investors have faith in us. I’ve always enjoyed working at Everwise, but it now feels like a real startup again. There’s fun, there’s positive energy and there’s trust. Previously, there was a slight cultural divide between the SF and NY office. That problem has been solved by changing the teams, more collaboration among and transparency from senior leaders, and efforts to make both offices work together. Our new leadership is very open to feedback and involves the entire company in decisions. I love the fact that our engineers have taken the initiative to teach each other new skills and technologies, supported by food and drinks from the company. I love the fact that other Everwisers have organized internal workshops, yoga, meditation and learning paths. In 2018, I’ve learned about stress reduction, prioritization, influence, mindfulness, feature flags, functional programming, Unix tools and how to build a successful company. I’ve attended professional workshops, internal lunch & learns, whiteboard sessions, presentations and Everwise learning paths with other Everwisers. This has all been part of my job. These opportunities have been available to everybody.

We’re a quickly evolving startup and things aren’t perfect yet. Not everybody likes that type of environment. On the positive side, Everwise is one of the friendliest companies I’ve ever worked for and there are opportunities to make a difference.

* Access to Sequoia's generous suite of benefits * Unlimited time off (and no pressure not to take vacation) * Convenient office location * Working with new technologies on a product people like * Salaries are pretty average for a startup our size * Very strong chance of success for the company * Great culture at NYC office * Lots of collaboration within engineering team, down-to-earth attitudes * Good communication with other teams, which helps us move quickly

* Strange priorities for product development from engineering leadership - we spend lots of time developing features that people don't use or on re-re-re-refactors of existing functionality, and then we end up with too many features to maintain correctly * micromanagement from leadership - we spend too much time arguing about small things that don't matter * constantly changing requirements - leadership/product teams have difficulty making up their minds about what they want, leading to lots of requirements churn and extra work done by engineering, design, and QA teams. * No test automation - see points above about having too many features to adequately maintain and too many changes to requirements * Lack of mentorship and learning opportunities (this is changing with recent engineering manager hires) * Horror stories about the San Francisco office