Great team and mission. - werkgeversreview Software Engineer bij Get Better

Two excellent reasons for working at Better. First, there’s a real sense of being part of a team on a mission. Coming from the UK I had no clue that the US healthcare system was so broken. We make a big difference to our user’s lives and that matters. Second, Rachael is a great CEO who has a strong vision and tireless energy to help the company grow. She can explain the most complex healthcare issues in simple terms and find a work around for every problem. I started working with her before she founded Better. In the beginning, Rachael was simply doing it all on her own and it’s been amazing to watch and help the company grow. It’s exciting that I get to work on projects that have an immediate impact in people's lives. I get to see that in the comments, reviews, and emails from our users on a daily basis. It’s rare to get to work on for a startup that has such immediate impact and everyone on the team plays a critical role in making this happen. A lot of hard work has gone into getting the company off the ground. When issues occur, the team works hard to find the root cause so that more support, resources, or features can be put in place to help things run more smoothly. Being a resource-constrained early-stage startup means this doesn’t always happen as quickly as I’d like but I always feel heard. The road map and goals are there – we just need to get there faster.

The work is tiring. Because we are growing so quickly, everyone on the team has too much on their plate. It is hard for engineering to keep up. At this stage, I think it is very important for everyone on the team to know their limits. Rachael tells everyone to let her know if they feel overwhelmed or need to adjust their workload but it is up to each person on the team to recognize and reach out when they need more support. Also, when we made the move from the house we worked out of in Oakland to our downtown SF office, our tea selection shrank considerably. We need more choices of tea!

A chance to be involved with a really unique idea for a product in an area that truly needs it.

There is not much more I can add to the previous review: ("Incredible mission. Also one of the most negative experiences in my career."). This company began from a really unique idea in a space where there was no competition with that product and high demand for it. That set up is hard to find. While the idea was good, nothing else was good. Nothing else felt good. Employees are over asked and underpaid and under appreciated. It was commonplace to expect 6-7 day work weeks, with no thanks let alone adequate compensation or talk of compensation for it. I watched a small team of really talented people get wasted away-- completely mishandled, mismanaged, and unappreciated. There is a complete lack of leadership and professionalism at the C level. Even when that's admitted, they refuse to bring in any leadership to help or tap the amazing small team of talent they had on hand to help. The CEO will absolutely not give any kind of power or authority to anybody but herself, even if she is unable to meet the most minimum of requirements of an employee for months on end, let alone that of a C level exec. It's a form of micromanagement at it's worst. This is the ultimate downfall within the company and causes a ripple effect from there. The CEO wants to do everything, do it only her way, and do it on her own. She feels threatened if an upper level manager, COO, or investor comes in and has any say over her. She'll run something in to the ground so long as it means it's done the way she wants to do it. Even when everybody else can see clear as day it's not the way to go. There is no structure or organization. The dynamic between the Founder/CEO and anybody else was toxic. It created one of the most tense and toxic working environments I have ever experienced in my career. Employees never felt good. Ever. The company missed a lucky opportunity to take a small team with amazing talent and turn it in to something more. This could not have been mismanaged any worse. There were no clear goals, expectations, clear position paths, compensation paths, or any realistic expectations for anything all around what-so-ever. There was no big picture. No concrete roadmap. No goals to meet. It was a diurnal flow of manually handling whatever crisis came up that day instead of engineering or taking the time to solve it right, prevent the crisis from happening in the first place, and move on to scale the product. Instead, extremely bright people were tasked with very manual work at a scale that was impossible, even for the brightest and most efficient of employee. The CEO refused to hire when investors told her to hire, and the employees suffered the most for it. The product ultimately suffered. It became an impossible situation. I watched a small pool of really talented and hard working staff get scrutinized and picked apart over really trivial things while nothing was done to help the major fires they were fighting. And the CEO likes to do this to people in front of the room full of employees. All of this while they were each doing the work of 10 employees, at a salary way below what even 1 normal employee should have been getting, and just kept on chugging and taking the beating. Each of us saying, "This can't go on forever. It will change. Tomorrow. Maybe it will change tomorrow," and tomorrow never came. There is only so long an employee can take of that, and eventually all of the original core team of hires left. And we all left with a form of PTSD from this experience, that has now effected our confidence in our new jobs. It's a really unfortunate thing.