Engineering is good - Software Engineer The RealReal Employee Review

4.0
12 May 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

There are tons of opportunities to contribute. I'm pretty junior as developers go, but I've been involved heavily in creating the mobile web product, reengineering the checkout process, reorganizing the home page, and creating several features from scratch. Senior devs are good, and management within engineering is good. They take the time to partner with you, sit with you through code reviews, talk about business implications of features to excite you, and to generally show you the ropes of being a startup engineer. They encourage you to try out new technologies (Famo.us, Angular, Elastic Search) and bring them into the stack where appropriate. There are regular feedback sessions that align expectations. Dev team is fun. We play ping pong all the time and chill after work together. The CTO goes out of his way to get us toys (kegerator, xbox one, etc) for particularly hard pushes that impact the bottom line. Last point - the tech team seeks out best practices and does its best to implement them. We run on 2 week sprints and use Pivotal Tracker. We have retrospectives that genuinely improve our sprints as we move along. I feel like my suggestions are taken seriously.

Cons

Location is terrible - you'll need to have some form of transportation or be okay with 45 min of bussing around to get to the place. Consequently, food choices at lunch are limited, though there are a few healthy and tasty options around. Firing isn't always done the most diplomatic way. We've had to cut slack, but I'm not sure the way we did the cutting was the best. We hire Indian sub contractors to do some portions of our code base that aren't customer-facing. My biggest complain with our tech process is that we use these sub contractors - communicating with them can be hard, and even as a junior dev I can tell some of their code is wonky and hard-to-read. Their involvement is pretty limited, and I deal with there code spaghetti pretty rarely.

Explore other reviews about The RealReal

5.0
8 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Overall, the receiving team is very sweet and engaging. They try to help you when you need it or ask for it.

Cons

When you don't reach your goal, they do get on you/

2.0
13 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Pay and commission can be good, but the structure is unnecessarily convoluted and not as generous as it seems, and you will have no work/life balance if you want to actually make consistently high commission. If you have a true passion for luxury and fashion, you do get a lot of opportunities to handle and interact with special/rare items, and depending on store location you can meet a lot of interesting industry people and celebrities, especially during Fashion Weeks

Cons

Poor and unsupportive management with extremely unrealistic demands and expectations; you will get virtually no training, but are immediately expected to know how to do everything. The overall company culture is just unpleasant and very cliquey, and there's constant employee turnover. The online customer service system is terrible, so you will frequently have to handle customer issues that have nothing to do with you/your sales.

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