Pluspunten
There were some very wonderful things about working at Boundless. The individual contributors are great. Most of my peers on the product team (engineering and design) were smart, engaged, extremely competent, and invested in asking the right questions and building the right product. We all cared deeply about the maintainability of our code base, and focused on ways we could make it better. While we often disagreed with each other about ways to do things, the team was very unified on big decisions, and had a good culture of talking through decisions to ultimately get buy-in. My manager, when he was able to just be an engineering manager, was excellent; he cared about my feedback and career progression. (Towards the end of my tenure at Boundless, he was forced to double up as a product manager, and that led to a deterioration of his efficacy, unfortunately.) I also had the pleasure of building internal tools, and therefore having to work closely with the customer success team. They are incredibly dedicated, hardworking people and excellent coworkers. The individual contributors are what make this company great; they are deeply invested in each other, the customers, and the culture of Boundless. I am very sad not to be working with these people anymore.
Minpunten
There were a lot of problems at Boundless, which ultimately for me ended up being too overwhelming to stay. In a lot of ways, I feel as though leadership (meaning much of the management team, although much of this criticism is directly on the CEO, despite my not having working much with him) pushed me out, which was really sad and disappointing. From my early days at Boundless, I was told that leadership wanted feedback and constructive criticism. At that point, only my manager had any experience in a leadership role, and it felt like they wanted to improve. There were instances where I gave them tough feedback, and initially it felt like they were listening. But eventually I learned they listened, but didn't seem to internalize or really hear the feedback. I was there for a little over two years, long enough to see recurring patterns in the way that leadership behaved, especially when it came to the treatment of non-product teams and how product decisions were bottle-necked. I started to see repercussions to the criticism I was giving, including accusations of being non-collaborative, a negative cultural influence, and of assuming bad intentions. These accusations felt very gendered (I’m a woman), especially in light of all the positive comments I was getting from individual teammates. The amount of emotional labor I was being asked to put into interactions was exhausting; I spent far too much time trying to cater to the comfort of people with much more power than me. Meanwhile, leadership was making the very same mistakes over and over again. (And also making new mistakes that would have been easy to avoid if they’d bothered to get input from the teams.) I watched people get more and more wary about trying to fix problems, as the repercussions got stiffer. I was given feedback that my "lack of trust" of leadership was a barrier to promotion; when I pointed out that leadership had done a number of untrustworthy things, that was waved off and I was told "leadership is not going to change." By the time I left, I would say Boundless had developed a culture of fear. Many employees were too nervous to speak out as working conditions worsened. Several people left without jobs lined up. (During the pandemic.) There were lots of many small incidents while I was there that led me to believe that leadership was not paying attention to individual contributors who were experts in different areas. The final straw for me happened because I felt that leadership was not take the data security of our customers seriously enough. While many startups play pretty fast and loose with security every company that I know of that deals with customer personal identifying information (PII) requires at the very least a background check on the employees that are going to be able to access that information. Trying to deal with a large backlog of customers in a short amount of time, Boundless leadership decided that that wasn’t necessary. As an engineer with some experience in cyber security, I pushed the engineering team to draw a line and insist on security restrictions. The response from leadership is unfathomable to me. They insisted on moving forward; I had to be in several very heated meetings in order to get the barest protections for our users. I understand the desire to move fast is baked in the startup model, but there are certain risks that are unacceptable. I wasn’t surprised that leadership hadn’t thought about the risks they were taking with our customers’ data; but their response in the face of my and the rest of the engineer team’s expertise was frankly distressing. I can’t be sure, as I was not invited into the higher-level meetings where decisions were made, but it felt like it stemmed from an inability to listen to feedback that didn’t validate their beliefs.