Hi all! Im wondering how the culture is at slack at the moment. I’m complentating a career change and am approaching the end of the process with slack. It looks like the company has grown a lot pretty quickly, and the stock is starting to settle after the IPO. How are things there (compensation, work/life balance, morale, intersting work, etc....)? I’d appreciate your thoughts!
I am not an engineer but I can tell you that the culture in general is quite amazing. Everyone is incredibly collaborative and there is a real focus on putting the customer in front of everything we do. Folks also take WLB very seriously and when the day is done, you are expected to go home. Morale is quite high, which I was surprised by given the drop in stock value from IPO levels. For example, the last post made to internal Slack section on blind was over 5 months ago! Nobody seems to have anything to b*tch about. The perks (SF office) offered are at or above anything that a "cool" bay area company offers these days, except two things: - No daily lunch and dinner (lunch served on Mondays, HH on Thursdays and breakfast on Fridays) - No unlimited PTO. Standard offer is 3 weeks. Comp: If you can bring competing offers, Slack gets really close to Tier-1 levels of pay. Especially in engg. Overall, it's a great place to be with a few minor shortcomings.
I am relatively new to Slack (post-ipo).. so maybe that factors into my views.. don't know.. but I literally LOL'ed at the "too suppressed or depressed" comment. The thing about Slack is that we use Slack... a lot! Everything is communicated on channels and there are channels for everything. And most are public. Including one that is called Slack-AMA which is monitored actively by execs. So if you want to ask/confront the CEO/CFO about anything, you're free to.. and folks are brutally honest over there. So are the answers. And given that Slack saves all history, even a new joiner can read every Q (and responses) ever posted on the channel. I was surprised to find very mature conversations about the listing process and the stock ups and downs. In fact, every other month Stewart does a in-person AMA for every new hire class. And yes, we asked him whatever we wanted. So no, there is definitely no suppression. I am sure some pre-ipo old timers are disappointed the stock isn't worth more.. but then they got their RSUs at such low values, they are probably still doing pretty good. Finally, I haven't seen any major announcements on re-orgs (again these are only communicated publicly in channel) so I am not sure where those rumors are coming from. I do know that we are now over 2k employees so as with any fast-growing company, team structure changes will be prevalent. Again, am not saying it's Utopia out here. Slack is yet to meet an economic downturn since it's inception.. so no one knows how that will impact the company or it's culture. Competition is heating up and leadership is focussing on expanding the feature-set to make the platform more sticky, while also expanding the sales teams. No one knows if that's enough to win the collaboration battle. Either way, all I can say is there are some really smart people steering this ship and there is more transparency here than most companies I can think of.
Wow, thanks for writing out such a detailed post. Most of the people I’ve asked about slack have had very similar things to say about the culture. It sounds like a really cool place. Thanks again!
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