Team matching + mentorship at Robinhood?
yoe: 2 TC: ~250k I got an L2 offer at Robinhood (TC: ~310k, hopefully higher after IPO bump) that I'm considering. Except I won't have a team match until after bootcamp. I want to make sure I wind up on a team with a good manager (clear expectations, technically accomplished), good opportunity (hard technical problem instead of something rote), and good teammates (high-caliber engineers). I've heard mixed things about Robinhood infrastructure, documentation, product vision. I've also heard from some that the best engineers have jumped ship already to earlier-stage companies or FAANG and that the work at Robinhood can be impactful but technically not very compelling. My main worry about accepting the Robinhood offer is the risk that I find myself on a team where I stagnate, not so much career-wise but skill-wise. Or that I don't get mentorship and support as I try to improve. I want to focus on becoming a really good engineer above anything else. How confident should I be that I can match into a team that challenges me to learn and grow? And, people in the know, what's the actual quality of Robinhood engineers + opportunities at Robinhood these days? Of course they're probably at least Google caliber but what about in comparison to companies with good hiring bars, other hot decacorns (e.g., Stripe, Databricks, Databricks, Chime, Plaid, Brex, Argo, Aurora, Airtable), companies that have been known in the past to hire only top-caliber engineers (Dropbox, Airbnb, etc.)? Recruiter has of course reassured me many times, but I want some toxic blunt Blind users to give me the real truth. Especially as the company is growing so fast.
It's gonna be pretty hard to stagnate at a company the size of Robinhood (probably more likely of it happening at Google). You'll get hands-on experience with building the low level infra required to scale whatever product you work on, which is going to be very valuable for career growth. I think it's worth trying, especially since it also comes with a big pay raise. You could always go back to Google any time you want to anyway. Also, curious, what valuation is your 310k quoted at? 11.7B?
IPO valuation, which is private. So if the IPO tanks, my TC tanks. If the IPO moons, my TC moons.
Also Rh isn't my only offer, so there are other companies I could go to that are at the size/hype of Rh.
I'm about to join the Robinhood PM team and wondering this also. I'm assuming the work will be more interesting than mine currently. If not, I plan to try and move teams. Robinhood's future is bright, this is a good place to be and grow
Joined RH from Google few months ago. Mentorship is MUCH BETTER than what I had at Google. I joined GCP as ng, and all rest of the team are long time googlers(10 years) and they are not giving shit on mentoring new hires. No One wants to mentor a ng since it’s not befitting to their promo from L5 to L6. I feel exclusive a lot for a the very first year.
But at RH people are glad to mentor new hires not only because it’s good for their promotion but also better for teams projects scope. And then people can land more good projects.
Hi, would you mind saying what projects your working on? Are they technically challenging? Thinking about joining.
Sorry I can’t. But for my personal technically changing, transferring to full stack from infra background is the biggest one.
Tbh most work is crud apps. And infra is mostly devops.
how is data infra and how is crypto team
How's data org?
@OP - how's the IPO bump? What valuation/share price was your grant awarded at?
I chose Google over Robinhood for new grad. Heres my take: RH has mostly young engineers, mediocre to solid talent. The quality of engineers overall seem to be worse than quality of google engineers. A lot of managers there are either really young or are desperately recruiting senior managers externally. You have a shit ton of autonomy since the company is moving fast but at the same time the company right now is trying to stabilize its engineer efforts due to upcoming IPO. You likely won't be doing anything interesting for the next few cycles. Upper management kind of a mess and projects getting scrapped left and right but that's part of a growing company. Promotions and career growth is hazy and unorganized. Learning growth is eh, Youll probably just write CRUD apps, but atleast you won't have google infra babysitting you so you'll learn the whole stack
I’m sorry we lost you to google and couldn’t convince you of the opportunities at Robinhood! The first part of what you shared is true: when Robinhood started it was mostly junior engineers (great ones, but didn’t have industry experience) managers (both ground level and leadership) now are looking to hire more senior folks because they recognize the importance of bringing in not only top talent but also top talent with experience. You call it desperate, but isn’t that the smart and right thing to do? We are trending upwards here, and that’s a good thing! the engineering and product efforts are definitely still very much ambitious. If you talk to anyone at Robinhood right now, I’m sure very few will say they’re working on anything uninteresting. The product ambition is huge, and it’s exciting to work here (I haven’t seen many posts where Robinhood folks complained otherwise) In terms of scrapping projects — that might have happened a year ago, but we are in a much better shape after the aforementioned senior hiring. Leadership has really stepped up and it’s being run by folks who know what to do it sounds like maybe you interned there a couple years ago and didn’t like the experience — I’m sorry to hear that, but know things have changed!
I chose RH over Google My friend at Google left to join RH too. His reasoning: “much more growth and interesting opportunities.” My reasonings are similar Team: Don’t think you’ll stagnate here. There’s plenty of work to do that’s challenging and impactful, especially with the hyper growth going on. FYI, you can change teams in 6 months to try something new too Quality of engineers: Many people at Robinhood are ex-Google/Facebook/Amazon/etc.