Peek is in a weird phase where we are trying to scale to become a larger company, but constantly dodging the accountability of a larger company and referring to themselves as a start-up.
The pay is fine, but varies greatly depending on the person and the market they live in. The whole compensation ideology is to pay as close to market average as possible. Talk of growth and compensation don't happen as often as it should. Some people haven't had a raise in 2 or 3 years, and during a time where inflation has run rampant. Often raises come to those who were grossly underpaid and perform well above their station, while people who are performing well and who are fairly compensated are told that they cannot get a raise because they are already compensated well enough. Promotions have in the past come without a bump in compensation, or the compensation is delayed by 6 months because it has to go through a process of approvals. Such a time intensive process feels weird for a company that considers itself a startup when it suites their needs. They have also talked about putting in processes to evaluate compensation every year, but I have yet to see the effect of that.
There have been a few layoffs, the company wasn't immune to the problems of COVID, but the second restructuring/layoff came out of left field and in a situation where we were all told that things were as good as they had ever been from a revenue perspective. Many of these people could have been retained and repurposed to help drive new strategy, but these people were never given a chance. They laid off some really competent people.
They took away a 401k match benefit to save some money, but haven't brought it back and have talked about how they don't plan on bringing it back. The justification for that was that a company of our size in our field doesn't often offer that benefit. There has been a cultural shift from a small scrappy company who cares greatly about the people on the front lines to a company that is trying to scale and grow and constantly dodge accountability to their employees.
The corporate side of things and the people actually doing the work on the ground feel like two different cultures. Executives aren't often transparent about what happens until far after changes take affect. They also will often step in and change our roadmaps and plans. So sometimes, you won't know what you are going to be working on for the next quarter. They are often chasing revenue, which isn't necessarily an issue, it keeps the lights on, but constantly chasing revenue doesn't often lead to quality software.
We have a quarterly planning process, which means that often times we cannot deliver always deliver fully baked features and have to cut a lot of scope. It seems like the company at large doesn't want to commit lots of time to something for fear that they will need to pivot at a moments notice. This can be fun, but also means that we don't often have the time that we would need to really deliver at the quality and feature scope we would love to deliver at as engineers. Though all of this does seem to be getting better.
