I got an offer to join box as a Staff SWE. During my interviews, I felt the company has good work culture, but was unsure about the business prospects in an otherwise crowded space. Can anyone working at box comment on the work culture, business prospects, and general direction/confidence in leadership? I've not started the negotiation process yet, just received a verbal confirmation from my recruiter that they will be making an offer.
Box sucks. Their app is worse than Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. and they compete in a very crowded space on what is essentially a commodity.
thanks, I had the same perception. Just want to confirm with someone already at box if it's just a perception or reality.
Its culture sucks. Just read Glassdoor reviews
When I was still at Microsoft, I had friends who worked on OneDrive. The consensus there is the same - the space is essentially a race to zero. Hopefully someone from Box can chime in and offer their take.
Culture is terrible. Had a staff box eng interview last year who said it was toxic and the bar has gone down drastically since failed ipo.
thanks. did he provide examples on what was toxic? too much beauracratic process? lack of good tooling? long work hours? If it was process, I agree it takes a negative toll. if it tooling, it could be an opportunity to innovate. work life balance is a personal choice, so YMMV there. Just trying to understand "what" is toxic.
Among the many problems at box, one big one is technical debt. they started an effort many years ago to start writing unit tests for their code since at the time (pre-ipo around 2013) they had hardly any (somewhere 5-20% depending on area) unit test coverage. Of course the code itself was very difficult to test because it was so poorly designed, coupling lack of cohesion etc, but since the guys in engr driving this effort were effort were part of Aaron's inner circle and were so bad (or rather awesome php coders?) this was not apparent to them. the original box code was primarily php procedural code ... In one particular case they had a 10000 line function they were trying to write unit tests for... everyone was afraid to touch the code since any refactoring has a high probability of introducing regressions that may not be caught. Hopefully they have progressed much further these days, glad I was not part of that ride !
OP what was your offer like?
Op here. I ended up not going to box. My offer was generous, to say the least: base salary of $240,000 & RSU's of $880,000. The reason I did not accept the offer was that I was skeptical about the team I got assigned. It seemed like a lot of tech debt for a relatively less visible team within box. Most engineers in the team were smart, but they were relatively inexperienced for their level; which made me think that the staff level at box was lower than that at LinkedIn. I may be wrong about it, I'll never know.. but I think it was the right decision *for me* given I'm much happier at LinkedIn with decent career path for now.
The numbers looks good , is it for staff swe?. Am interviewing for sr manager roles and don’t see lot of info out there and is looking for leveling info and salaries
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box is dying ... why you want to join now? pre-ipo may make sense.
Except we're becoming profitable this year so doing something right.
thanks rainin, how is the work culture. I've heard that a lot of features are built "one-off" for particular enterprise customers. Is that still true?