Squarespace culture
How is the work culture at squarespace? Interviewed with them and everyone was super nice and culture seemed good.
WLB has been super awful for my team - pretty constant pager duty issues, constant firefighting. As people quit, they don’t do anything to fix the oncall burden and just expect a team of 3 or 4 to cover full time critical system rotations. We bring up the issue to management over and over, nothing is done. Lots of fighting and politics when it comes to OKR planning and lots of drawn out tech review processes that don’t add much value. I find rank and file ICs are pretty high quality at Sqsp but as you go up to staff, principal, director and many managers, talent is quite poor for a company like ours. Salaries have generally been good but there are virtually no raises, not even for big promotions, and initial equity and refresher grants are way below industry standard, but even with lots of people quitting because of comp, the leadership has been aggressive about refusing to raise comp. Overall, Sqsp claims to have good WLB but it’s not really true for a lot of teams, and even in the best cases the stress of poor leadership and politics is not adequately compensated by WLB and certainly not by financial compensation. It’s a perfectly fine middle of the road company. Easier hiring standards than most places, people are mostly very collegial, good fringe benefits. ICs, especially more on the junior side, can get good resume experience to be a stepping stone to more serious engineering organizations. You will not find any interesting or challenging projects, leadership will not help you know what projects are valuable, WLB will not be as good as advertised, and above all, they will not pay you competitively. The CEO can’t handle criticism and deflects instead of practicing self-awareness. 9 times out of 10 this doesn’t matter, but every now and then he does things that really drain morale. Whether this adds up to a good trade off for you is totally a personal decision. To be fair, most other large tech orgs have similar problems.
Thank you for the detailed response. Would you say attrition is an issue right now?
Yeah, I would say it has affected several teams, and both new hiring and capacity planning are handled poorly by current leadership.
What role?
Staff engineer
95% of teams have amazing work life balance.....if you're on a team that doesn't....you can switch teams. The company is very cognizant of the employee's mental stress level
This has not been my or my team’s experience. People who requested to switch weren’t allowed, and management is really not paying attention to the issue - most glaringly in the form of severe understaffing in several places. Even for average teams, work life balance is merely “pretty good” compared to similar peer companies, absolutely is not “amazing.” WLB as a perk is massively oversold at Squarespace.
I agree - Squarespace WLB is *not* noticeably better than other companies I have worked at… and I’m on one of the easier/lighter teams at Squarespace.
😭
I get woken up at night often. Also, the on-call is never-ending because each service’s rotation has only 2-3 people on it
Depends on the group a bit, but generally an amazing work-life balance and plenty of time to think things through. Sometimes feels low energy and slow moving though. Overall I like it: have been here for years and have never had a major issue with anyone.
Thank you! Any thoughts on refreshers?
I was happy with what I got last year, and I didn’t hear complaining from people I am close with. I see complaining about them on here generally. Maybe my standards are too low!