Slack reviews

4.0

77% would recommend to a friend

(1,095 total reviews)
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Stewart Butterfield

88% approve of CEO

70% positive business outlook

Slack has an employee rating of 4.0 out of 5 stars, based on 1,095 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Slack employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Informatique industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

1K reviews
5.0
Jun 26, 2018

Hypergrowth adventure ride

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Slack for me is the best of two worlds: the excitement of a true startup, but with the financial stability of a large company that comes from having hundreds of millions of investment in the bank. This provides an environment of ceaseless forward momentum and opportunity to stretch yourself. There is not only an opportunity to put your stamp on things, but a necessity, as small teams try to achieve what is normally done by groups ten times their size at other companies. In general, your leadership will give you wide latitude and trust to get the job done as you see fit. If you are ambitious about your career, Slack is an open road.

Cons

Many people feed off the energy of a startup environment. If you don't, however, and instead seek stability and predictability, Slack will probably not be the dream employer for you. As a company that has achieved more in four years than other top tier tech companies have in ten years, change is constant here. If you have come from a large company like Google or FB, learning and development will feel different than what you are used to. You will find very little structured, classroom-style learning here, but you will learn on the job through being afforded opportunities to do things you otherwise wouldn't. Some may find this a little daunting.

5.0
Oct 22, 2017

Favorite job of my career so far

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Smart, empathetic coworkers who share values and motivation, feeling that you're making or growing something special that's really changing the way people work together, great perks that aren't too ostentatious, friendly to working parents, older average age so you're working with grownups, tolerance and/or support for creative experimentation, big equity potential.

Cons

Fast growth that makes consistency across departments hard to maintain, need to fill positions has led to some hasty hiring of people who turn out not to work out, leadership has genuinely great intentions that in some cases seem to be a challenge to follow through on.

5.0
Apr 17, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

I joined Slack as a Senior Software Engineer working on mobile in late 2014 when there were about 70 employees. Now, 2.5 years later, there are over 700 (maybe even 800?). Scaling a company that rapidly is chaotic and challenging, but having worked at other places who came out of that process with a bad culture and poor management, I continue to be impressed with the thoughtful way Slack management has scaled the company. Not every decision that's been made has been correct, but my experience has been that management is very open to feedback and willing to iterate on processes or change them completely when we can see that they aren't working. One thing we are known for outside the company is diversity & inclusion, and my personal experience has been very positive in that regard, though as a white woman my perspective is limited. We do compensation audits and adjustments every 6 months, both market rate adjustments as well as performance based raises, and I've been very happy with that process. Hard to be mad about getting a raise every 6 months without having to ask for it. The work life balance has been in my experience excellent. On the walls it says "work hard and go home" and throughout the 4 managers I've had in my time here I have never felt pressured to work late or work weekends to meet a deadline. We've responded to missed deadlines with retrospectives about our planning and estimation process, rather than blaming engineers or anyone else. There's a lot more I could talk about, but I hope this is a helpful glimpse into what it's like working here. My experience isn't universal, and as an earlier employee I probably have some measure of privilege that I can't see clearly at the moment, but I see myself here for years to come and can't imagine leaving unless there are dramatic changes in management (like if Stewart and Cal left).

Cons

Because of how fast we have been growing, it can get a little chaotic sometimes. There have been projects that have been 95% complete and then changed by management at the last moment, causing frustration and extra work for engineers. We are still learning how to most effectively communicate at this scale. There can sometimes be a tendency to be self-congratulatory for how, compared to other tech companies, we are more diverse etc. This is called out pretty rapidly when it happens, as it should be because we have a lot of work to do still. As management has said before internally, Slack Is A Distracting Menace. Working at a company full of Slack power users means that it can be hard to get work done without developing excellent focus skills.

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Slack Response
8y
Thank you for sharing! We are happy to hear that you have a solid work life balance and that you see yourself here for years to come. As you mentioned, rapid growth can be chaotic and challenging, though we are constantly striving to do our best to mitigate common growing pains. Thank you again for such a thoughtful review; feedback such as yours will continue to make us better as we grow.
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Glassdoor has 1,227 Slack reviews submitted anonymously by Slack employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Slack is right for you.