An overly long review of Goodreads
Pros
When I was at Goodreads, I would read and discuss every review that came on to Glassdoor. I loved seeing the feedback, although I wished there was a way to ask follow up questions. I think all the feedback in my review has already been given in person to people still at the company, but in case people have questions they want to ask - I was the manager for the SF services team. One note about the star ratings. I think it's always tricky with 1-5 star ratings, since everyone has their own scale. For this review, it will be linear. 1 star = 20th percentile, etc. Overall I think Goodreads is definitely in the top 20% of companies - assuming you are interested in working for a large company. First pro of Goodreads is undoubtedly that they have done an amazing job of culturally including people despite the massive growth they've experienced. When a company doubles in size in a short time period, especially when it goes through an acquisition, I expect there to be a large divide between the veterans and the rookies. It's not the case at Goodreads. I attribute this to a few things. One, there is a large focus on hiring friendly people that you would be willing to sit next to. Two, it's been culturally ingrained that most social events are open to all, and invites go out in the company chat room all the time. Game nights, movie nights, whiskey tastings, etc - everyone knows and is invited to these things. It's an open office with a good lunch room, so you also get lots of spontaneous discussion happening. Spending casual time with people was one of my favorite things at Goodreads. Second, most (all?) of the people at Goodreads care. It may be about the product, it may be about the company culture, it may be about the engineering problems - but people care about something. It's refreshing to be at a big company and not deal with apathetic people. More than anything, this is what gives me faith about the future of Goodreads. There are definitely issues, but there are people who care deeply about those issues trying to address them. Books. Not everyone loves them, but if you do, it's great at GR. I loved opening all the books that publishers would send us, and it's awesome hearing your favorite authors talk about using Goodreads. Authors will come to the SF office to speak and hold a Q&A, which is always great. Books are why I joined the company, and I wasn't disappointed. Interesting problems. Goodreads is at the forefront of what is happening with reading. The roles of book stores and publishers are in flux. Changes you make are seen by millions of people. Work you do might change the direction of the future of reading. It's often easy to get lost in the weeds at GR, and the vision isn't very clear - but every once in a while you'll be reminded exactly how big the future is.
Cons
It's not a startup anymore. This isn't a con for everyone, but it's certainly a con for many. That means you get more stability, access to a wide variety of training, and hugely complex problems to work on. You also get extra bureaucracy, extra restrictions, and the chance to work with people you know nothing about. Some examples: * Amazon has a ton of training classes available. The ones you are forced to take I generally found a waste of time, while I heard that some of the (less widely known) others were great. * Developing systems at Amazon means that you may need to prepare for extremely high levels of traffic, with extremely high levels of availability. That also means lots of design review and testing, and that there are no more cowboys. * There's a ton of time spent forecasting and planning resources for the upcoming year. The company now has access to over 2000 dev weeks a year - trying to make sure those are allocated well (based on priorities, schedule, preferences, and lunar cycles) is like a 4X game gone rogue. * Trying to operate within the Amazon ecosystem can be a huge pain. We often ran into extraordinary delays in trying to leverage various tools or systems. Knowing who to talk to is hugely important, but even that may not help you take advantage of all these resources that Amazon offers. It's a company that is transitioning. It was a 30 person startup 2 years ago, and now it is a ~120 person subsidiary of a giant company. A lot of processes and people are still under varying stages of development (or missing altogether). * I think senior management is still getting used to not being able to drive execution directly anymore. They know they have been bottlenecks and are trying to address it. However, I think they should make an even larger adjustment completely away from any tactical responsibilities, and focus solely on strategy/vision/mentorship. Stan, if you ever read this, I hope you remember our epic discussion on strategy and tactics! * I think middle management is still getting used to being managers. Many of them have not managed before. There are training classes and material available, but there was not a focus on training and mentoring people as managers. This was starting to change as I left, but I think it needs even more focus. * I think individual contributors are still getting used to less visibility and influence. For example, see the review about the 'controlling product team'. I don't agree with the text of that review, but perhaps the subtext is just that there is now a team owning the product - any ideas and changes have to go through them. With 120 people, there's a bigger burden on communicating ideas and priorities. Right now the burden is too high. They've been trying some new things (e.g. brown bags) to help, hopefully this will be a continued focus. For what it's worth, I never found the product team arrogant, and always felt I could express my priorities. Maybe it's different since I was a manager, but I don't think my reports felt that way either. * Some more cons that don't need elaboration: Outlook, Google Docs may be getting phased out for Sharepoint, much of the technology you work on is proprietary to Amazon, perks are few (other than books!), and I'd say compensation is average to below average. One last note - I wish I could talk to whoever wrote the 'Good People, Bad Company' review. Some of the complaints echo others I've heard (e.g. unclear mission/direction), while others are a total surprise (e.g. pressure to work nights/weekends). PS. It's really hard to try to think of everything about a company at once, and in a vacuum. This would have been a lot easier if I just had a voice recorder for all the discussions we had at the office. Or if I rambled less.
