The start of a brand new year is the quintessential opportunity for individuals to set new goals, establish positive intentions and build better habits for even greater success going forward. Sometimes that includes leveling up in your current career — and sometimes it involves an about-face into a whole new role or organization.
While The Great Resignation was a hot topic last year, many of its effects have rolled over into 2022 as individual contributors continue to consider what’s most important in their work-life balance and how their careers impact their well-being. Often a key indicator on whether to stay or go? Company culture.
According to Built In’s research, 46 percent of job candidates believe culture is very important in the application process, with a grand total of 88 percent of job seekers citing it as at least of relative importance. At such a staggeringly high percentage, tech companies have realized that focusing on evolving their specific culture beyond checking off an industry buzzword is crucial to continued success — for both employee retention and the company’s longevity.
“Our core values are included in every interaction, discussion and decision we make as a team,” said Kate Kelly, principal product manager at DreamBox Learning. “When you combine inclusion with our emphasis on constant learning, being adaptive and benevolent friction, the team culture is supportive, open, driven and exciting.”
In short, culture shouldn’t just be about fostering a positive work environment: It should be a motivating force encouraging continuous professional growth and be easily identifiable as the factor uniting teams behind a common mission. That’s why Built In Seattle asked seven employees from Seattle companies to sum up their company cultures in one word, and elaborate on some of the most exciting projects they’ve accomplished as a result.
Curious on how these companies could contribute to your personal resolutions? They all just so happen to be hiring.
Describe your company culture in one word.
Curious.
I think curiosity best describes one of the most satisfying aspects of being a “Chewtopian.” The idea to discover, to seek and to learn is firmly built into everything we do. As a team, we constantly look for ways to reinvent our thinking, be a champion for our customers — both humans and pets! — and work collaboratively as a team.
One of the ways our teams demonstrate curiosity is by observing new pet trends and understanding what customers are thinking, how they are feeling and what are their unique needs. We’re on a mission to always be a source of support and delight at each stage of our customer’s pet journey. We get really into researching and sharing insights, and we geek out as a team.
It’s no surprise the pandemic has transformed our lives — and that includes the lives of our pets, too. More than ever, we rely on pets for companionship and emotional well-being. Our pets also play a huge role in helping us connect with the real world. For example, you can’t scroll through your social media feed without catching at least a few pet memes. At Chewy, we integrate consumer insights and our own learning to create the best customer experience.
We’re on a mission to always be a source of support and delight at each stage of our customer’s pet journey.”
How long have you been with the company, and what professional growth or development have you seen in that time?
I am a newbie at Chewy, having joined the team in November 2021 in our new office in Bellevue, WA. I have never felt more supported and inspired as a newcomer. The energy and momentum of the brand is simply unmatched, and there are endless opportunities to grow professionally and develop new skills with a challenger brand like Chewy.
I have been most impressed by the talented and passionate teams working collaboratively to put our customers first. As a pet parent, I count myself lucky to be able to stare at my dog, Charlie, and create marketing strategies to delight and meet the needs of our human and pet customers!
Describe your company culture in one word.
Rewarding.
We thrive on building great software, and we take pride in owning it from ideation to delivery. Discovery empowers individuals to take on unique challenges and we have so much fun doing it.
In the past year, we built the foundation for a global, scalable platform, and we’re so excited to drive innovation bottoms-up.”
How long have you been with the company, and what professional growth or development have you seen in that time?
I’ve been with Discovery for just under two years, and in my time our team grew from five engineers to over 80 very talented software development engineers, service delivery managers, technical program managers and PM-Ts with room to still grow.
I could not have managed building this high-performing team — during a pandemic, no less — without the support and trust of our incredible leadership, and the numerous development and support resources available to us. In the past year, we built the foundation for a global, scalable platform, and we’re so excited for the next year to accelerate market growth and drive innovation bottoms-up.
Describe your company culture in one word.
Hungry.
At Barn2Door, everyone is always striving for the best: whether it’s the sales team working to sign up new farmers, the marketing team pushing to find the most effective way to spread the word, or the success team ensuring that each farm is reaching their full potential on our platform. The engineering team is no exception to the hungry culture. We are hungry to learn — and regularly offer internal training — about new technologies, design, patterns or features.
One of the benefits of internal training is it ensures the team is constantly learning and staying up to date with the rest of the industry. We push to keep up with a rapidly evolving software development industry to ensure we can make informed decisions and implement best practices. By staying at the forefront of technology, we make sure we’re always providing the best possible experience to our customers.
Working at Barn2Door has fast-tracked my career while pushing my own professional development.”
How long have you been with the company, and what professional growth or development have you seen in that time?
I’ve been at Barn2Door for four and a half years. In that time, I’ve seen the company go from being a startup run out of the CEO’s basement with just a handful of interns to a venture capital-backed fast-growing company with more than 70 talented, passionate employees.
When I first joined as an intern in 2017, I was just starting to get a grasp of what it means to be a software engineer: learning how to write performant and maintainable code, how to collaborate with other engineers, and how to get new features into the hands of customers. Since then, I’ve been given many opportunities to grow as an engineer. I’ve led complex projects all the way from the technical design phase through development, QA, including customer rollout and maintenance. I’ve also architected cloud-based systems that can scale to meet the needs of our rapidly growing customer base.
Now a lead engineer, I have the opportunity to coach others to grow their skill set while helping build Barn2Door. Working at Barn2Door has fast-tracked my career while pushing my own professional development.
Describe your company culture in one word.
Inclusive.
Our core values are included in every interaction, discussion and decision we make as a team. Customers are included in every step of the process, sharing their needs and experiences about how we can better support students and teachers. When you combine inclusion with our emphasis on constant learning, being adaptive and benevolent friction, the team culture is supportive, open, driven and exciting.
The moment I realized DreamBox was special was about six weeks into my job. We were meeting with team members from development, research, design, curriculum and client experience. The meeting centered on some difficult prioritization that would impact how we would move the project forward. Meeting attendees had opinions grounded in customer feedback on how we should proceed, and the discussion got heated. When we were done and had a procedure, everyone felt good. We’d focused on the customer and adapted and engaged in open dialogue as a group. This felt so natural — I knew that this was a company that lives its core values, and I felt incredible.
Constant connection with customers is essential for delivering a solution that delights.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently, and how did it help you grow professionally?
I was lucky to work on the DreamBox Predictive Insight release at the beginning of the pandemic. A multidisciplinary team had started working on this project well before I joined the company. However, I was given the opportunity to move us from early feedback programs to an embedded solution in our Insight Dashboard.
The solution was an interactive, complex report for educators and administrators. As schools started shutting down in March 2020, we pivoted and gave districts early access to these reports, providing data before the end of the school year that they could leverage to best support their students.
I had two big learnings from this project. First, it reinforced the importance of bringing our customers along for the journey as we introduce new products. Constant connection with customers is essential for delivering a solution that delights. Second, the project gave me a new perspective on how teams can quickly adapt to meet evolving customer needs.
Describe your company culture in one word.
Autonomous.
I’ve generally had the freedom to work in domains that are engaging and important to me. After ramping up at Anduril, my manager directly asked me if I wanted to continue working on data infrastructure, work on generalized machine learning tooling, or build a framework that interacted with front-end analytics. I was already fascinated by what I was working on and told him that I wanted to continue in that direction. He supported my decision, and I’ve been going down that path and significantly increasing the scope of my work ever since.
It’s mind-boggling that I went from knowing nothing about data engineering to owning core infrastructure.”
How long have you been with the company, and what professional growth or development have you seen in that time?
I’ve been with Anduril for about nine months now. I joined the company with a couple years of experience in generalized app-layer software engineering, building infrastructure that served high-traffic web pages.
Prior to joining, I expressed interest in working “closer to data,” admitting that I had no experience in that domain whatsoever. Immediately after joining, I began working on an end-to-end data pipeline that ingests all production data, transforms and uploads it to the cloud for long-term storage, and post-processes it for optimized querying. This ecosystem has been used by our hardware engineers to effectively engage in data-driven engineering to rapidly iterate on our products. It’s also been used by machine learning engineers to data mine computer vision anomalies and improve our models.
It’s mind-boggling that I went from knowing nothing about data engineering to owning core infrastructure that stores almost everything that flows through Lattice. This speaks volumes about the pace at which we move, the talented mentors who have deeply cared about my technical and professional growth, and the amount of autonomy I’ve had since day one to do work that actually matters.
Describe your company culture in one word.
Connected.
People at Wyze work very closely and share ideas quickly across teams. Everyone is willing to put in the effort and lend a hand to each other to fight for the common goal of making too-good-to-be-true products. When I first joined Wyze as a fresh graduate new to the tech industry, everyone in this company was very supportive and helped me learn more and grow faster. Time flies — I have already worked in Wyze for five months. So far, I feel very engaged with my work and have a strong sense of belonging. I'm looking forward to continuing working with such a fantastic team of people. Go Wyze!
Everyone is willing to lend a hand to fight for the common goal of making too-good-to-be-true products.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently, and how did it help you grow professionally?
Ever since I joined Wyze, I have been working on developing the body fat scale series of products. I was very impressed by how Wyze put the user first during the product development process with a rigorous attitude. The team always tries its best to explore and learn the user’s needs and deliver the in-demand features to the fullest while offering an affordable price.
For example, we have checked the user reviews and feedback very frequently to learn the flaws of the current design and find solutions to solve them. We keep learning from user needs to develop new features, like the baby and pet mode in the new scale that will help measure the weight of your baby or pet easily, and we keep running tests and collecting data to improve the accuracy of our body metrics algorithms. From these hands-on work experiences, I learned how to be friends with users.
Describe your company culture in one word.
Supportive.
I’ve always felt supported, both by my fellow engineers and by management. I feel safe coming forward with worries and points of improvement, and know that I can take the time off that I need to keep my physical and mental health at its peak.
For example, I came forward to the full team with concerns about an aspect of our testing structure. I expected a bit of pushback and was worried that I’d have to defend my stance, but as soon as I presented my concern, it was met with understanding and cooperation. People had questions, but they approached it in a healthy manner that made me feel listened to, and we worked as a team to come to a consensus. Disagreements are always part of a job, but I’m happy to know that I’m somewhere that is built around supporting each other and building each other up to be the best engineers we can be.
The confidence I gained getting to work on a thorough architecture process was a joy, and I felt like I came out a better engineer than I went in.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently, and how did it help you grow professionally?
The coolest project I’ve worked on recently was actually a tech design! Skilljar’s tech designs are the most in-depth and expansive I’ve come across in my career, and I was so excited to have the chance to write one for a large and very exciting upcoming feature. Navigating every tiny detail of a feature and having the chance to work together with the product team to really dig into making a plan to implement the change was fascinating, and an incredibly fulfilling learning experience.
The confidence I gained getting to work on such a thorough architecture process was a joy, and I felt like I came out a better engineer than I went in. Having such a huge sense of ownership in a feature of the platform is always a great thing, and having the support of my team while I dug into it was unforgettable.
