Note: I'm in the Product Development department, which houses software engineers, quality-assurance engineers (QA), user-experience designers (UX), and product managers (PM). It also contains our Operations and Security teams. Other departments are probably great also, but this review pertains to my department.
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Small teams.
We work in small, focused, 6-person autonomous teams comprised of a few software engineers, a UX designer, QA engineer, and a product manager. Each team is focused on cranking out software solutions to delight our customers; there is very little bureaucracy and very few top-down mandates. My team's product manager presents several high-impact projects, and we work on whichever project we think is most interesting. We all have a say in what we work on, so we all feel a sense of ownership over our projects.
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No deadlines.
We try hard to deliver quality software in incremental stages, getting feedback from our customers along the way, so we hardly ever waste time developing features that no one wants. Management trusts us to iterate quickly and deliver value rapidly, but there is also an understanding that it's important to build sustainable, maintainable code. Consequently, we can take the time to code it right, and be proud of our work. I've been really impressed that no one imposes arbitrary deadlines on us. For example, toward the end of a recent project, even though we had finished shipping the feature, we decided we needed an extra week to refactor the code to integrate it nicely into our codebase. So we took the time to do it right, and no one batted an eye!
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Great culture.
Every couple weeks our team has a "retro" -- a meeting where we look back on the last couple weeks to see how we can improve. Retros start with "appreciations", where people take turns thanking their teammates for their help and support. It sounds corny but it's actually really nice. Who doesn't want to be appreciated at work? And there are lots of events: We have team outings (we took a trip to the local zoo), volunteer days (the company gives us a day a year of paid "volunteer time", we recently went out into the Santa Barbara hills and repaired some hiking trails), hackathons, tech retreats, and contests to make the best guacamole and present it in a funny skit.
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Good infrastructure.
Writing tests for our software is deeply ingrained in our culture. We have a huge suite of tests that run in an automated fashion every time you change the code. The philosophy is essentially, "If the tests pass, then you didn't break anything." It's very luxurious to be able to release code knowing that you didn't break some feature on the other side of the codebase. It lets us move quickly with confidence.
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Investment in employees.
We have a great onboarding program, bi-weekly 1-hour in-depth tech lectures, bi-weekly sequences of 15-minute tech-demos, and a curriculum of ~40 one-hour workshops on various aspects of our tech stack. Management agrees that it's vital for us to keep our skills up-to-date and sharp, and it's a great asset to have so much knowledge-sharing as part of our culture. We also do a lot of pair-programming, which I really like. It's a very high-bandwidth way to learn about our code base.
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Good work-life balance.
AppFolio does a good job of providing some amenities, but not so many that you feel pressure to live at work. For example, we have lots of yummy snacks, coffee, and various sodas (all free!), but you wouldn't be able to eat all your meals at work. I like that we don't have on-site massages, laundry, child-care, or haircuts. Santa Barbara is too beautiful for us to spend all our time at work, so we have enough amenities to make our work-time enjoyable and comfy, but not enough to stay cooped up in the office. People get to work around 8:30 or 9 and leave around 5:30 or 6. Because we try to deliver value in a steady stream of small improvements, the work is very consistent, which contributes to my work-life balance.
