You'll be happier elsewhere. - Software Engineer Flip CX Employee Review

2.0
12 Aug 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Office perks included some free coffee, teas, sodas, and snacks. They bought pizza for everyone once a week. They had unlimited vacation days within reason. The business outlook is pretty stable. The team is full of awesome people on a personal level. And they're good at presenting the company well. If you just want to be a code monkey and are not too concerned with the quality of your output, this might be a good place for you. The management team is mostly self-aware enough to admit the issues outlined below and will claim to want to work to improve them.

Cons

Let's break this into parts. Professional Development: - You won't gain much knowledge or skill here. They hire you because you already have it, and they want to use you for it. - They misuse and misunderstand a couple libraries & tech, so that you won't gain valuable experience with them. You'll have to learn to use them the right way if you go anywhere else later. Creative Atmosphere: - All creative decision making is handled by the management team. Any idea you have will likely be put off, added to the heap, and they'll sort through them as they have time. Any excitement or passion you have gets quelled by the process. - Collaboration isn't really a thing there. Someone always goes off on their own, does a ton of work to design and plan something, usually in a google doc, and then the individual tasks get doled out to you. Some preliminary meetings may happen for like an hour. And most communication or feedback happens through low-bandwidth comments on the google doc. There's no on-going, close-knit back and forth development. Management - You'll be frustrated by the pedantic attention given to their project management software. There's an explicit, detailed procedure you have to follow for everything. Tasks are assigned to you outlining every step of your work that you are to follow and which are handed down by the management and product teams. - When you're asked for input, you will also then spend an inordinate amount of time writing the aforementioned google docs describing, in detail, not only the interfaces that should be created in the solution but also all implementation details. - They slow or deny the implementation of any technology that the CTO is not familiar or comfortable with. Code Quality & Dev Ops - You might expect that such tight control over the process maintains quality, but you'd be wrong. - There is a ton of technical debt. You will wade through it in any project you work on. You'll want to refactor it, but you'll get the same answer every time that there's not enough time at the moment, they're just going to do it this way for now, and you'll circle back to it later. The result is the addition of even more poor code and technical debt: you'll have to work around the bad code, add conditions for old formats, etc. There's so much of it that, and so many committed promises encoded in it that they'll never get out from under it. You'll also likely wonder if they consider much of it as debt at all. - This also as the added effect of elevating usually mundane implementation details to critical discussions that consume your time and give them the opportunity to reiterate the tech debt mantra of doing it later. - The code base is not well designed at all. Nothing is fast, efficient, modular, or easy to read. - Testing is non-existing. You'll push to production and pray your code works. And you'll get called out when it has customer facing consequences. - They made a huge technical investment in YAML configuration files, so much so that there's a logic parser written around it so that they have their own proprietary YAML-based language. It's not easy to work in. It breaks a lot. You'll miss changes all over. Leadership - It's hard to tell where all the poor leadership originates. I think it was probably with one person in particular who micro-manages seemingly everything. - They hold a TON of meetings - They paradoxically value engineering time in that they want to minimize the cost of it, but so many technical decisions create more burdens on your time in the form of more bugs; multiple versions of code running in parallel; regular, ongoing maintenance tasks; and carefully monitoring logs. - Software and the work that goes into it seems mostly treated as a means to an end. The mission is to achieve the end goal as quickly as possible regardless of impact on the team or their software assets. Respect for Your Time - Mostly, you'll likely feel like an oxen. You're there to grind away on their work, doing it their way.

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Flip CX Response
5y
Thanks for your feedback! I'm sorry to hear that you didn't enjoy your time here. I'll walk through a few items that hopefully address your concerns. Technical debt, code design, and devops: Technical debt sucks. At a bootstrapped startup trying to move fast, it can be hard to tackle. We've prioritized it over the last few quarters, and in the last 9 months, we've worked on: - Entire phones infrastructure, so that it's at (no joke!) a level and scalability comparable to a carrier like AT&T. We even went so far to work with the open-source author of Kamailio to help us fix bugs in their system that we found, and consult with us on how best to build our phone infrastructure long-term. It's a difficult project, and went months over our original estimate, but we kept at it because it's important to lay the right foundation for long-term success. - Nearly all of our "accuracy" code & infrastructure. As this grew from a super simple microservice into a major, complicated microservice, it scaled quickly in complexity, and original structures suddenly were handling serious load. We recently spent 3 months taking a step back and fully rebuilding it so it can stand the test of 10x growth and new advanced features. A new engineer onboarded onto it in less than 2 days and started coding! - Migrating most of our portal from plain javascript to React. We're also redesigning the entire portal to make our design framework easier to use, limiting time and bugs, and finishing the conversion to React. - A full linter for our call flow YAML, so that it's far easier to use and catches mistakes before they happen. - Invest in automated testing for several of our services, a better CI/CD pipeline, and systems for canary deployments and AB testing. We've also started using Datadog and Pagerduty, so we now have a fully automated alerting platform. We haven't had a serious, uncaught issue in months, and our emergency support line gets called more by spam than by clients with actual issues! Management: - I'm sorry to hear that you don't think we adapt the latest technology, or that we slow-walk it. We strive to find the balance between using new tech "just because", business practicality, and what all members of the team are comfortable with. We've implemented or are implementing Snowflake, Kafka, React, the latest phone infrastructure tech, python 3.8 (from 3.6) and more. - We migrated project management to ClickUp, which is much easier to use than our original tool. Project management software is helpful to plan projects and make sure things don't slip through the cracks. - We've been working hard to make sure that everyone is involved from ideation through execution. I'm glad to say that over half of the larger projects we've worked on in the last few months (I went back and counted!) originated from someone not on the leadership team. Professional Development: Within the past 6 months, we've implemented Lattice, a people management software to help our employees track career goals and develop the skills they need to succeed. Our managers are trained in conducting regular 1:1 and career conversations to ensure that each employee continues to develop professionally. All in all, I really appreciate your feedback. Thanks for taking the time.

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5.0
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CEO approval
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Pros

This is a scrappy start-up that is growing fast. It’s the start of something truly special with the product, growth, and culture.

Cons

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1.0
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CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

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Cons

The founders are very young and inexperienced. Two of them have never worked for another company besides Flip/Red Route, and it really shows - in their business decisions and overall day-to-day. The company also had (and probably still has) very high turnover. Do your research before joining. Highly recommend looking up past employees and seeing how long they stayed at Flip on LinkedIn.

5
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