3y
We strive to make everyone's experience positive here and I'm sorry that you weren't happy with yours. Thank you for recognizing how much we value feedback - yours is no exception. We have already taken action and enacted positive change, but there is more work to do.
Firstly, it sounds like you projects you were assigned didn't match your preferences. Some team members prefer a multitude of shorter projects to rack up more end-to-end development experience while others enjoy working on products with continuous iterations, with pros and cons to both. This tells me we can do a better job surveying employee interests so that we can more accurately consider them alongside client needs when making staffing decisions.
Secondly, we weren't immune to the Great Resignation and I regret losing some great team members. We've made an effort to improve retention with regular team building activities, more upward mobility based on results and merit, and the addition of more experienced engineers and team members. We now have several team members that have programmed for ~10 years or more. Additionally, we recently hired a CTO with over 35 years of industry experience to help us scale successfully. We think these actions will improve retention and encourage further investment in our team members.
Thirdly, it is no secret that we offer starting salaries below market. There are two main reasons for this:
1) We want to attract talent that is confident in their ability to grow with the company and deliver results. As such, we use end-of-year bonuses, rapid promotion opportunities, along with uncapped compensation aligned with KPIs at higher levels to share the upside in financial performance.
2) We are a bootstrapped company where profitability is very important for survival. We do not subscribe to the high engineering salaries and cash burning that ruled tech for a long time. Instead, we start off team members on a modest base, and offer significant rewards to those that deliver value. We think there are benefits to our fiscal responsibility as we have doubled our team in the past 12 months and are able to offer job security at a time when most other tech companies are undergoing mass layoffs and/or having existential worries surrounding their next round if financing.
Lastly, I appreciate your advice about product. We finished a smaller bot product toward the end of 2022, and it's on our strategic roadmap to develop a bigger bot product in 2023 based on market feedback. We have a plan and have already taken action to bring it to fruition. It will be challenging to work on, and fulfilling to better support our clients and the communities they serve!
Thank you!
