A new engineer's POV: Culture at Statsig

Tue Sep 10 2024

Andrew Huang

Software Engineer, Statsig

I had been back from South Korea for less than 24 hours when I started at Statsig.

Even with jetlag and the post-vacation blues, I was super excited to get to meet everyone, and I was greeted very warmly.

One of my teammates, Maria, made a little sign welcoming the new folks, and the entire office had signed a welcome card for me which they delivered to me with a bunch of Statsig swag.

my welcome card

I hopped into a few quick onboarding meetings, and I met with my onboarding buddy, Alex, to get started on a few ramp-up tickets. When two o’clock rolled around, we all got together for our company-wide stand-up, wherein we celebrated (and clapped) for feature launches, sales updates, and got some high-level overviews of the company.

Since I was new, I also introduced myself and shared a fun fact (I’m very double-jointed). After standup, I tried ping pong for the first time in over a decade with a few newly made friends, and I realized just how bad I was at it.

The console team’s weekly standup

After all of that, I worked through my first few tasks and even managed to push to prod on my very first day.

Month one

My first week mainly comprised of onboarding and trying to learn everyone's names. That wasn’t too bad—the hard part was learning the names of everyone’s four-legged friends. Everyone on the console team had to make “starter packs,” which was a really fun way to get to know my teammates.

As June arrived, I embraced the challenge of revamping Statsig's onboarding flow. Our mission was clear: streamline the experience for new users while keeping it clean, visually appealing, and more intuitive.

Collaborating closely with our design and product teams, we embarked on a comprehensive overhaul. Our objectives were to simplify the user journey, enhance visual appeal with a fresh, modern look, and introduce new, user-friendly icons for better navigation.

The result was a sleek, custom-tailored onboarding experience that resonated with our users. This revamp didn't just improve aesthetics; it delivered tangible results, leading to a significant 10% increase in successful onboarding completions.

With the help of our amazing product managers and designers (shoutout to Akin, Andy, and Daniel), I was able to earn my first round of applause at our daily standup. It felt great!

Our daily 2 pm standup

Not much after was our quarterly Hackathon—a throwback to my college days!

Equipped with 4 meals a day and an office pantry full of Costco goodies, I got down to work. I tinkered around with a couple of ideas, like building out a VSCode extension and working on autogenerated code, but ultimately ended up joining a few of my teammates to build out a Beta Testing feature.

This feature empowered Statsig users to create betas for new features and automatically enroll users into it to simplify the process of choosing and enrolling users in beta tests and experiments. Our team built this by leveraging Statsig’s feature flags, adding a way to generate custom URLs that users can click to enroll themselves into a specific feature. I primarily worked on the front end, creating the UI entryway toward this new flow.

Through excellent leadership and a great team, our team won us first place!

our hackathon team

Quarter one

We kicked off the quarter with an infra x console team bonding at a laser tag arena.

The rivalry was fierce, and all of the games were super close (lowkey console definitely beat infra). More importantly, I realized just how great we were at working together and communicating.

I was expecting people just to walk around and get tagged randomly, but even before the games started, both sides started planning their offensive and defensive strategies, noting who would be up on the tower, who would rush and capture which areas, and so on.

our laser tag team

As I settled in more comfortably and onboarded onto my team, I realized that our engineering culture is world-class.

I am given amazing help and support, and there are subject experts in even the most niche of areas that I can bounce ideas and thoughts off of. No one really ever gets “blocked” by anything—we find a way around it, or make one.

The other thing that I began to appreciate more and more was how fast we iterate over things and how customer-oriented we are.

Our developer workflows empower us to make changes for our customers the same day they give us feedback, and all of it can be rolled back with the click of a button, thanks to our feature flags. As an engineer, it feels great knowing a change you made directly helped someone (and so quickly too).

Statsig’s values

August marked our annual ping pong tournament. Though I had been practicing on weekends with my dad, I found myself up against two of our best players, Marcos and AJ.

Despite the tough competition, witnessing some intense showdown matches was incredibly fun. Many games were extremely close, keeping everyone on the edge of their seats.

Lior and me in a friendly game of ping pong

During this time, another significant project I took ownership of was our analytics dashboard.

I implemented new features like relative dates for our metrics explorer widgets, as well as PDF exporting for easy sharing. Throughout the process, I tackled a variety of challenges, from resolving intricate bugs to fine-tuning existing features.

As a result, our users now enjoy a more seamless workflow, allowing them to harness the full potential of our analytics tool with greater efficiency and insight.

At the end of the summer, we had our annual summer picnic. Unfortunately, in typical Seattle fashion, it started pouring rain, but our amazing events team managed to relocate the entire event indoors. (Nice work, Morgan and team!)

Our sales team flew in from all over the US to meet us, and it was awesome getting to meet my virtual colleagues and everyone else’s families. We had a wide variety of food like sliders, tacos, and even kimchi fried rice—I took so much home afterward!

the statsig team

Takeaways

All in all, the last three months have been nothing short of fun, but they've also been incredibly enriching.

I've had the opportunity to work on impactful engineering projects, and learn from world-class engineers whose expertise and willingness to share knowledge have accelerated my growth. These experiences have not only made me a better engineer but have also shown me what it means to be part of a team that truly embodies its values.

As I look forward to the future at Statsig, I'm excited about the continued opportunities to learn, grow, and make a meaningful impact.

The blend of fun, learning, and purpose I've experienced in just three months makes me confident that joining Statsig was the right choice, and I can't wait to see what the next chapters bring.

Create a free account

You're invited to create a free Statsig account! Get started today with 2M free events. No credit card required, of course.
an enter key that says "free account"

Build fast?

Subscribe to Scaling Down: Our newsletter on building at startup-speed.

Try Statsig Today

Get started for free. Add your whole team!
We use cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website.
Privacy Policy