Tech tends to be more friendly with vacation time in the US than most other industries. It still varies a lot, but it’s not uncommon for a tech company to start you with 3-5 weeks of vacation time plus 8-12 paid holidays throughout the year. It still could be a lot better though, and I agree that it contributes greatly to burn out.
Elastic works similarly, though not to the extent that was described in that Gumroad post. It also varies a bit by team, but I've worked on many teams over the last 5.5 years here, so I have a decent perspective on what's normal and how things evolved to this point.
Engineering is distributed around the world, so it happens in a highly asynchronous way centered around GitHub issues, the vast majority of which are in public repos. Slack and Zoom are used, but if they're used to make decisions, the recording is saved for others to consume and the decision is documented on GitHub.
Meetings are discouraged, but not non-existent. To give some context, I'm a manager of two teams and this week I had 4.5 hours of meetings (including 1:1s), which is pretty normal. When I was an independent contributor on a single team, I often had weeks where I had a single 30 minute meeting.
In practice today, I suspect an engineer at Elastic will spend an average of ~2 hours a week in a meeting, with a few spending a great deal more than that and others spending less.
This culture is demonstrated top-down and has been a common thread from the early days, through the IPO, and continues today.
Edit: We also have a general philosophy of features being done when they're done rather than when we reach some arbitrary date. This doesn't mean we don't have timelines (we have ~2 month long release cycles), but if we can pair down scope to make a release, we will, and if we can't do it then we'll just move the feature to the next release instead.
That's the main part - to be paind enough so that quarter/part time work is enough to live comfortably anywhere in the world and have a time for side hustles. "Work less" as the article mentions.
As with anything that is potentially contentious and involves humans, there's a lot of nuance here and breaking it all down into a couple paragraphs doesn't really respect the unique needs of everyone. I've worked with some amazing people that respond best to very informal processes around performance-based feedback, and I've worked with some equally amazing people that desire a relatively rigid and analytical process. I think we all try to do what's best for each person.
That said, it's important that we do have guiding processes and principles here to ensure that everyone is being evaluated both fairly and effectively, so it's not like the wild west or something.
Every "track" has levels with defined expectations in terms of the type of work they do, the impact they have, the interactions they have with teammates, others at Elastic, the community, etc. High performers would be folks that are at least meeting the expectations established for their level, which is where promotion comes in.
Promotion is not necessarily role-oriented in the sense that you don't get promoted out of being an engineer into management or something like that, they are different parallel tracks. For example, I technically took a demotion to switch from a Tech Lead to an Eng. Manager role.
Processes do vary a bit team by team, though they've become more consistent over time and are pretty similar now. This is how things work on my teams:
I have 30 minute 1:1s with each person that reports to me every 2-3 weeks depending on their seniority. This is pretty informal, but the consistent face to face gives us opportunities to talk frequently about how things are going.
Every quarter I do a longer review with each team member. This isn't super formal or anything, but it is more structured with a corresponding doc that I fill out in advance and that we both expand upon during our meeting. Nothing should be a surprise here as I give positive or critical feedback more regularly, but this is where we can really dig into aspects of their performance, rehash current expectations for their level and make plans with them for how to achieve their professional goals, whether it be promotion, type of work, transitioning to a different role, etc.
The 6 and 12 month reviews are a little more comprehensive as I also include anonymous 360 feedback from peers and others throughout Elastic.
We do, yeah. We include "target" seniority designations in the job post titles, so if it doesn't say "senior", "principal", etc, then it isn't a senior position. We also don't (for the most part) have requirements around years of experience, though in practice there's an obvious correlation.
That said, at this very moment we happen to have a boatload of more senior positions available. There are a couple less senior ones though.
Wouldn’t this problem be even harder to deal with if you didn’t work remotely? You only need to plan for the radius of one person’s commute rather than limiting your housing options to a balance of two locations.
Totally, not saying it isn't a problem in that case either, but rather that remote is hailed as this "you can live anywhere, move to the cheapest city you can!" solution when it's not (for most people).
It's a choice to work a non-remote job though. My partner could work, but it wouldn't be remote, so she's a stay at home parent while I work remote, enabling us to live somewhere rural (which also happens to be cheaper; one income easily supports a family of four).
Both people in a relationship could work remote jobs to enable geospatial freedom, also a choice! When someone says that working remote isn't a solution though, that's not accurate. They're saying, "I've chosen a work arrangement that is incompatible with remote work".
That's something we've been looking at recently, actually -- moving somewhere cheaper, but the problem we've found is that there just really aren't any jobs that she's interested in in the area we've been looking at (even outside of her current field, which she wants to leave anyway) -- we're looking at one spot in particular because of my mountain biking hobby and because I've lived there and have a lot of family there --, and we don't have kids, so it's hard to determine "okay, is it fine for us to just move and for you to have no idea on what job you want to do there?" even though my income is more than enough to sustain us (4x hers).
For her, the idea of doing that -- moving with no job or even an idea of what job to do there -- doesn't sit well. She doesn't like the implied dependence on me and that others may see her as a failure because she doesn't have a job for X time or an idea of what she wants to do. I can do all I can to convince her that that isn't the case and that not everyone has their sights set on something when they're in high school/college (I did, which doesn't help). Ultimately I think the change would be good since I think her job/boss in our current city is toxic and mentally rough, such that moving to an entirely new area with totally different prospects could create a positive.
For every one position we hire for we’ll see 100s of applicants, and we might have 5-10 good choices to hire. Filters are a critical part of managing a candidate pipeline, and for better or worse a degree is widely used as a filter for those companies that don’t lack a pool of qualified candidates, which also tend to be pretty attractive companies to work for.
Elastic is technically a European company and is distributed around the world. EU headquarters is in Amsterdam, US headquarters in Mountain View, AP headquarters in Singapore.
Somewhat disappointed with applying there. Spent some time writing a detailed cover letter as my experience lined up very well with the requirements for a role, never got a response months later.
As of 6.5, the Elastic Stack ships with a logging app and an infrastructure monitoring app out of the box in Kibana. They are both new, so expect a bunch of new features im 6.6 onward.
Come work with us on Kibana. We're looking for senior level software engineers with experience building JavaScript apps.
Elastic is the company behind Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Beats, and we're always interested in talking to engineers with a track record of doing great work throughout their careers.
* Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
* Stock options
* Paid bonding leave for parents with newborns
* At least 4 weeks paid time off, 1 week of volunteer time, paid holidays, etc.
* An environment in which you can balance great work with a great life
* Employees with a wide variety of interests and backgrounds
* Your age is only a number. It doesn't matter if you're just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.
* Distributed-first company with employees in over 35 countries, spread across 18 time zones, and speaking over 30 languages! Some even fly south for the winter :)
I live in a small city in the US, and remote work has provided me opportunities for career progression and networking that would otherwise be impossible for me unless I moved my family somewhere else.
The key for me has been to work for distributed companies rather than as one of the few remote workers on the team. This seems to make all the difference in the world.
Pretty much this. I live in St. Louis. I've got 15 years' career experience, the last 5 of which were remote; I've been able to do impactful work for major east coast and west coast names you've definitely heard of.
It's been an amazing opportunity to level up my career and my skills. If you told me in late 2012 that I'd be doing what I do now, where I do now, I'd have laughed you out of the room.
That said I've had to work a little harder on things like conference speaking and attendance, in order to build up a network and offset some of what I miss from not being in the room every day with people in NYC/SF.
Come work with us on Kibana. We're looking for senior level software engineers with experience building JavaScript apps.
Elastic is the company behind Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Beats, and we're always interested in talking to engineers with a track record of doing great work throughout their careers.
* Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
* Stock options
* Paid bonding leave for parents with newborns
* At least 4 weeks paid time off, 1 week of volunteer time, paid holidays, etc.
* An environment in which you can balance great work with a great life
* Employees with a wide variety of interests and backgrounds
* Your age is only a number. It doesn't matter if you're just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.
* Distributed-first company with employees in over 35 countries, spread across 18 time zones, and speaking over 30 languages! Some even fly south for the winter :)
Looks like the work is good.But not sure of their hiring process.I always get the same canned response.Is it that some bots do it or recruiters.Their job description includes that we don't care about titles etc,but not sure if they are really following that.
Kibana team members are in time zones around the world (and sometimes inconsistently since some team members travel and work simultaneously). Most of our communication is asynchronous through GitHub, email, and Slack. When we need to have synchronous conversation we set up video calls, sometimes ad hoc and sometimes scheduled. We try to be mindful of each other’s personal lives and preferred working style and generally things just work out.
how much experience are you looking for ideally. Your company page says you're looking for backend engineers and I am really interested in working with distributed systems. The catch is that I am inexperienced and a new graduate
Kibana's an open source project, so if you're looking to volunteer, you can contribute directly to it without having to jump through hoops, do interviews, etc. We follow the same process that our open source contributors do, so read through the contributing guide, take a look at the issues, and dive in!
