FareHarbor Company Culture & Values

What are some of the growth opportunities available to you and your colleagues? 

To an outside observer, our Americas-based engineering team may look much the same as it did a few years ago. Aside from new hires, there have been only small changes to our organizational chart. But in the time I’ve been here, I’ve witnessed a lot of people on the team, including myself, develop many skills — technical and otherwise.

One of FareHarbor’s core values is “own it.” One of the manifestations of this value is that our individual contributor engineers are empowered to make product decisions to coordinate with other stakeholders, meet and coordinate with engineers from partner companies and more. They develop skills that are not always emphasized for engineers: written and verbal communication, collaboration, an ability to wear many hats and to shift perspectives from engineer to product designer to end-user.

Growth opportunities don’t always look like promotions or org chart changes. If you asked my engineering colleagues whether they had experienced meaningful growth over the course of the last few years, I’m pretty sure they would all say yes, even if their title hasn’t changed.

How does a focus on growth boost morale? 

Some people are happy doing the same things every day at work. Maybe they really enjoy doing these particular things, maybe they like routine or maybe their passions lie outside of work. Engineers tend not to be wired this way. They tend to be resourceful, diligent and inquisitive; they can also be restless, distractible, quick to boredom and potentially quick to look for the next best thing, especially earlier in their careers. A focus on growth is a good way to help keep everyone engaged, productive and happy.

It is reasonable for people to want to develop new skills. If they feel like they are gaining skills that will serve them later on, they are more likely to stay. If they feel like they are learning nothing, or learning things that would be useless elsewhere, then they may choose to go somewhere with more opportunity, for fear of plateauing or getting stuck in a role that they don’t find satisfying.

Several weeks ago we had an all-company hackathon. People from all corners of the organization worked with other people they might not have normally. It gave all of us an appreciation for other people's skills and spurred interest in acquiring some of them.