LivePerson vs Squarespace

Oct 29, 2021 12 Comments

I am expecting offers from both firms and was wondering what would one chose. I am more passionate of technology and liked the machine learning / ai aspect of LivePerson. While Squarespace stood to me as more nicer in terms of people and culture. Wondering if anyone at the firm can provide any valuable feedback.

Updates:
Squarespace team Data Privacy
LivePerson: Conversation Builder

LivePerson Squarespace
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  • What are the specific roles & teams and expected job offer parameters (comp, level, etc.)?

    You mentioned machine learning / AI - I would stay away from Squarespace if you want to work on that. Every good ML person we’ve hired seems to have quit in the past five years and we don’t take it seriously or give it support really at all. There is always talk of improving this, but I’ve never seen it go past talk and materialize into anything serious. We even have vocal staff & principal engineers who openly make fun of machine learning and say it’s nothing but a fad / hype, act like ML engineers are not “real” engineers, even though they have no experience with it and no understanding of how it could help us or how professional ML engineering works.
    Oct 29, 2021 3
    • OP
      Thanks for the update, I just checked with recruiter and was mentioned to be in Data Privacy team. Overall how is the work culture and work life balance?
      Oct 29, 2021
    • I can’t speak much to Data Privacy specifically except to say that they don’t seem to have a professional understanding of how to do things like privacy or SOX compliance at all - it seems like a bunch of policy bureaucrats that have never actually been part of organizations that solve those problems at scale and need to account for keeping developer productivity high while still solving compliance. So far, they tend to just do things in a secretive, top down manner, like locking various global settings of GitHub repos, creating blanket retention or deletion requirements that don’t work for all use cases. And creating weird “100% of all teams must do X” type objectives without ever talking to teams and seeing if it’s possible, how long it would take, or if more headcount is needed to make it happen. It leads to a lot of teams being pretty unhappy with them and a lot of turnover.

      For general culture, Squarespace is pretty average, not much interesting work. Work life balance & “unlimited vacation” is overrated and work stress is higher than admitted. Upper level engineers, like staff & principal, are not very good and seem more interested in “thought leadership” and making a name for themselves than actually solving hands on problems. Strategy & planning is a constant disaster. Directors and managers pretty much do nothing across the board. The company celebrates mediocrity horribly, especially on the SRE / infra side, where they focus on engineering their own ideas and not what the customers (other engineering teams) actually need. A very unreasonable amount of Squarespace engineering effort is spent on conveniences for SRE or legacy parts of the main site serving application, with disingenuous false pretense that those work areas are under-appreciated and need to be defended, when really it’s the total opposite. Various other technical areas like our whole A/B testing infrastructure, data pipeline tools, machine learning & data science, accessibility, and alternative monetization like email campaigns, are completely ignored and even insulted by core SRE and site serving team leaders and senior engineers, to keep the false narrative that prioritization should keep going towards SRE & site serving conveniences.

      But for junior ICs it can be a good place to get years of experience before moving on. Salaries are decent for NYC, though equity, refreshers, and raises are all super poor. People are collegial and friendly, conflict-avoidant to a fault and there is virtually zero weekend chatter.
      Oct 30, 2021
  • Shitty old school company with assholes in it. It’s a trash company and you will regret it. Let me know if you need more details. Stay away
    Mar 24 1
  • My first question would be what team at LP; some are farther from the ML/AI and some are close. Conversation Builder is a good team to join since that’s your interest area ✅.

    Work/life balance depends on your role and team. In my experience it’s good though, but sometimes I have to make it good myself (pushback).

    To me, the engineering org leans way far toward a customer focused culture versus optimized engineering. We have huge brands and bend to their will at times when it’s not worth the resource spend, and improving processes/product/vision take a back seat.

    The company overall culture is pretty good. They did a lot from the top down during the panny. Gave stipends, let us keep/own all our office stuff (probably cheaper for them), went perm-remote, internet/phone bill refunds, a bunch of new programs/benefits.

    Overall a good company, but not without the problems of a large B2B.

    Hope this helps.
    Oct 30, 2021 1
  • We take ML / AI seriously, but unless you are on one of those teams you won’t be working on it. We do offer all employees training and courses though, so you could learn it and then transfer teams I suppose.
    Oct 29, 2021 1
  • CB team focuses on chat-bot and and they also maintain a system from front-end to back-end around chat-bot build, serving and management. I know some engineers there need to collaborate with DS on NLP models. Of course, LP is not perfect, a typical 2B company (sometimes not engineering optimized).
    Nov 3, 2021 0