Pros
Very remote-friendly (compared to other companies I've worked at). Slack-heavy async culture and almost everything is live-streamed as well as recorded Extremely flexible schedule. Need to work from home? Need to take vacation? No problem Excellent work/life balance. Managers will chat with you if you're working nights and weekends Some of the best people I've ever worked with. Lots of very passionate and friendly people. My people manager is excellent and I genuinely enjoy my 1:1's. The team does semi-annual peer reviews, and I consistently feel they are very high quality. The team will go out of its way to help you Cutting edge tech. While we have some older stacks in places (some older Rails/Sinatra apps, some jQuery and Coffeescript) we're scaling out pretty rapidly with newer technologies (almost everything is managed by Kubernetes, React is used heavily in the front-end, and we've ported many core services to Elixir) Lots of interesting work. You can work with some edge browser technologies in our player. Maybe you'd prefer to help optimize our upload flows regionally or have ideas how we can improve our streaming. Perhaps you care more about making sure we are doing efficient development and want to build tools to make it easy to do canary deployments. How about stats and analytics? Or maybe iOS development? Take some time to learn about the nitty gritty of ffmpeg and video transcoding. There's no shortage of interesting problems to work on Fun work is real. Pitchfest and the Febbies are just two examples of the many ways the company strives to keep Wistia engaging while still professional Very supportive. Wistia takes a lot of pride in building soft skills with activities like Show & Tell and Demo Day where you can work on your presentation skills Open company. Company feedback is also always discussed candidly and I'm really impressed that we've been able to have group discussions about diversity and equality in the company's opportunities in a professional and direct manner Very hands-on and DIY culture. If you like challenging problems and thrive on control then you will enjoy it here. Wistia has a wide surface area and not enough people to support it all so it's easy to find opportunities to step up and take ownership for some chunk of the business. Autonomy is very high
Cons
Wistia is having a small identity crisis as it is transitioning into a more mature organization. There has been some churn lately with employees, product, and strategy amongst other things. This feels like normal company growth to me and I think Wistia is handling it in a healthy manner but it can still be discomforting The company is known for its personality and some of the folks who have been with the company for a long time and helped create that personality have left recently A recent internal liquidity event has added some pressure to the employees who have stayed with the company It sometimes feels like senior management wants the product to be something that it isn't but also doesn't want for it to stop doing what it does. New and shiny stuff gets love and attention while rote and shaky systems don't get the love they need until years of neglect have made it clear that they need dedicated resources Technical leadership can feel weak, unengaged, and distant at times. I attribute this to a lack of experience managing larger product teams High autonomy is more than just a productive benefit - it's an unspoken expectation. Wistia isn't setup for much hand holding and that can lead you to feeling that you're lacking direction or input at times. I wish we did a better job of explicitly empowering people to make decisions and take full ownership. I think distributing decision making is an obvious goal of the company - and we do take actions towards it - but we could be better about spelling it out. Who needs to be, should be, and wants to be involved in decisions can be murky and that can lead to wheel-spinning Wistia has a very wide product and the team is not big enough to support it all. This can result in a lot of juggling and frustration. While the team is collaborative and shares much of the responsibility, you're likely to find yourself being the only person who cares to dig in and fix some critical component simply because there is so much to do
