Pluspunten
I LOVED my time working at SourceStrike—it's one of the best spots to work in Orange County (and now since COVID they're been hiring remotely across the country). I could probably write a novel about all the great aspects of working here.
But I'll try to keep this trimmed to a few key aspects that make SourceStrike a fantastic place to work.
- The partners of the firm (Brandon, Adam, and Rob) are amazing bosses. They've got mountains of experience with both "in the trenches programming" and leading engineering teams. Not only that but they genuinely care about the people on the team and they're also pretty cool to hang out with.
- Good growth opportunities. I grew A TON during my time at SourceStrike. I got to lead engineering teams, make architectural decisions, and work directly with some of SourceStrike's large clients. With a lot of new clients getting signed regularly, there's tons of opportunity to start out on a relatively small project and see it grow to a team of 5-6 engineers.
- Long term projects. A large portion of SourceStrike's clientele consists of large, enterprise engineering projects. This means that when you get assigned to a client, you get to work directly with the client and you get to make engineering decisions for the long term (and see the effects a year later).
- Opportunity to try new things. One cool aspect of working for clients is that the tech stack may vary from client to client. So if you're primarily backend focused, but want to dip into the frontend a bit, you have the ability to.
- No BS culture. The tagline we used at SourceStrike was "By engineers, for engineers". The company has a strong engineering culture and is very light on top-down processes and procedures. A lot of software companies babysit and micromanage their employees, at SourceStrike you get treated like an adult.
- You have a ton of flexibility and control over your schedule—unlimited PTO, remote working (after COVID-19 too), flexible schedules, etc. As long as you get your work done and make it to any required client meetings, the rest is up to you.
- Amazing coworkers. The engineers I worked with at SourceStrike were top tier engineers. Much of my growth during my time at SourceStrike came directly from the people I worked with. These engineers know how to build high-quality software—not only are they technically skilled, they're team players and empathetic. You'll regularly be learning new things from your coworkers and pushed to grow in your skills as an engineer here.
Minpunten
No company is perfect, and SourceStrike is no exception. But most of these cons are more about client/consulting work than about SourceStrike as a company.
The leadership and culture at SourceStrike is by no means a toxic, and I'd consider it a fantastic place to work.
Anyways, a couple cons.
- Your experience at SourceStrike can vary greatly depending on which client you are working with. This is expected—since there's a lot of long-term projects you'll end up working closely with the clients. Clients vary in their schedules, the tech stack, how tight the deadlines are, and how rigid the processes are. That said, SourceStrike vets their clients a good deal and sticks up for the SourceStrike team when choosing projects.
- In my experience, tight deadlines and long hours happened frequently. This might have been the clients that I worked with. That said, Brandon, Adam, and Rob were always supportive of whatever flexibility I needed to maintain work/life balance.
- If you want to work in a single stack or a single framework, this might not be the right thing for you. The stack varies from client to client—I've seen projects using Ruby, Java, TypeScript, React, Angular, Vue, NestJS, React Native, and tons of other tech. That said, SourceStrike tries to get people working with the things they like. For example, if you REALLY want to work with React chances are you'll eventually end up on a React project.