Why I Joined Thumbtack as a Software Engineer

Imagine that you’re asked to answer this question: “What is on your checklist when choosing where to work?” There’s no doubt that opportunities for career growth would be placed at the top of the list. It’s also obvious that compensation is essential to support oneself or a family; we all need food and to pay rent or a mortgage. What else would be on your checklist?

I asked myself this question when I was about to start a new chapter in the United States. I was moving on from 9.5 years of work experience in Korea, and I began to take stock of myself and realized that what had fueled me was the culture of a company. After doing some math, I was able to convince myself why culture is so crucial.

Most employment offers require a commitment of 40 hours a week in the office, interacting with colleagues instead of family. Once we exclude the hours we can’t utilize — such as us spending 8 hours a day, 56 hours a week to sleep — the portion becomes almost 35% of utilizable hours. This doesn’t even include the hours we spend commuting, which can easily be 10 hours a week or more. Based on these stats, it becomes clear that working hours account for almost half of our time spent awake.

Where does the importance of culture come in? Despite the math, culture is admittedly general and vague. Thus, I’ve selected three applicable subcategories: diversity, collaboration, and work-life balance, and would like to share my expectations around these and how Thumbtack has exceeded my expectations.

Diversity

As an immigrant and a minority, diversity is incredibly important to me. Diversity isn’t just avoiding discrimination or unconscious biases. Embracing diversity is accepting others for who they are, respecting everyone as an individual, and listening to everyone’s opinions equally. These days, in order for companies to steer themselves in accordance with an ever-changing world, they have to embrace and amplify the diversity among their employees.

Frankly speaking, it’s hard to believe that any company will admit that they don’t care about diversity. But Thumbtack cares about it seriously — diversity is embedded in our values. We have high standards; employees must be respected as well as respect others, differences are embraced, and failure to do so will never be tolerated under any circumstance.

In addition, Thumbtack’s DEI (Diversity, Equality and Inclusion) team works to build, measure and hold the organization accountable for those values in everything we do. One thing I was most surprised about was that leadership openly shares metrics such as the gender ratio of leadership as well as the gender ratio of employees per department.

Furthermore, there are eight Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) to foster connections, provide support and create opportunities to share and learn from one another. ERGs work to amplify employees’ voices and advocate for the needs of members who are often underrepresented. Anyone can be a member of an ERG to understand the challenges underrepresented groups go through and to help vocalize these issues.

Collaboration

If people can build products independently, then they wouldn’t need to join a company. We all know how much collaboration is important to reach our goals, but it’s never easy to prioritize. It would be a utopia if everyone put others before themselves.

During my first week at Thumbtack, I felt like I was in a utopia. I felt very nervous about onboarding virtually, but to my surprise, my dedicated mentor and entire team reached out to me and asked what they could do for me. They were proactive in providing any help, which inspired me to take a proactive approach to help others in the same way.

Another example of Thumbtack’s amazing collaboration is the use of Slack. Employees use Slack to ask questions and connect at work, and most of my questions have been answered within a couple of hours or less. Everyone is willing to share their work, perspectives, and doesn’t hesitate to help out. Throughout my first year at Thumbtack, I had been curious if our level of collaboration was common in tech or one of our strengths. It turns out that not every company has been able to reach or maintain our level of collaboration.

Work-Life balance

When leadership announced that Thumbtack would become a virtual-first, not a virtual-only company, Marco, our CEO, shared a story about an unexpected present he received when starting to work from home. He said he couldn’t have imagined being able to have dinner with his family when he started the company. He also talked about the many hours we all used to spend commuting. I connected with his sentiments. I had previously worked in Seoul, known as one of the world’s cities with the heaviest traffic. Frequently, I found myself unable to have dinner with my family until 8:30 at night.

With Thumbtack’s virtual-first, not virtual-only working model, family dinners weren’t the only things I got back. I had a newfound control over my schedule and tremendous flexibility. I was now able to pick up and drop off my children, prepare meals for my family, maintain my home and run errands.

In addition, our new working model includes in-person events. We’re not just virtual-only. Thumbtack holds quarterly offsites; one of which was Camp Thumbtack — an all-company meeting that was recently held in Denver. Over a thousand of us gathered, got to know one another, and shared what we were working on. We also have local communities, where more than 10+ Thumbtackers in a city can gather. Each community elects an ambassador who represents them and organizes a quarterly event in their local area.

Thumbtack has exceeded my expectations

It’s been an amazing almost 2 years for me at Thumbtack. The company has checked the “above expectations” box for all areas beyond what has been described here so far. I’m looking forward to seeing how we continue to maintain our values and grow. If you’re preparing for a new phase of your career or looking for a new opportunity, we want to hear from you. Don’t hesitate to check us out. Come build your future with us.

Interested in joining our Engineering Team? Check out our openings at thumbtack.com/careers.