Pluspunten
- Since the programmatic advertising industry is a relatively new field and we operate in a very high noise low signal environment, there are few established solutions. This provides a lot of freedom to explore new ideas. It feels like research where the problems are complex and vague, and our ideas are not guaranteed to work. While it is challenging, it's also very fulfilling when a problem is solved. - The size of the team has been growing at around 150% YoY, and all the managers of the DS team are promoted from within the team. This translates to career growth opportunities, and at the same time the managers all know the technical details very well. The expectations of each level has been clearly defined and shared with us in our 1-on-1 meetings, and promotions were given where it's due because there isn't a fixed headcount for each level. - We also have ample opportunities with personal growth. There's a personal development budget that can be used towards taking online courses or attending conferences, and we were encouraged to attend one conference per year and share the learnings with the team. For example, with this budget we have people taking online masters programs, and many people attend conferences like NeurIPS, ICML, EMNLP, etc. every year. We may not have as much of a knowledge base as a big tech firm, but leadership has been very supportive to initiatives we take. For example, someone started a paper study group so we can catch up to academia, and managers are encouraged to ask their direct reports about their career goals so they could try to find projects that align better with peoples' goals. - Our leaders care very much about our wellbeing. The company conducts an anonymous survey every half a year asking people about their opinions on various aspects of the company and the team, and the results are aggregated and shared at the department level. Every time such a result comes back, actions were taken to make improvements. For example, in the last survey some team members raised a lack of high-level visibility into what others are working on, both within the team and across teams. In response, we added a short write-up of project context for our weekly project meeting document, and started sharing quarterly project plans with other teams.
Minpunten
- There are growing pains for a typical start up - the company has grown to a point where we can't keep breaking things all the time, but at the same time we don't have a perfect standardized process. Hence, processes and communications can get a bit messy from time to time, but I don't find it troubling because this also creates a lot of opportunities to find creative ways to make improvements. When I think something can be done better, my opinions are valued and we would discuss, test and implement if it works. However, for those who thrive in more structured environments with clearly defined tasks and standardized processes, this might pose a challenge. - Because we only promote managers internally, and they all come from a very technical background, it is true that they tend to not be perfect at managing. However, they have always taken an open approach to feedbacks and we constantly test new improvements suggested by their reports.