A Career At Cruise

As the entire world waits for autonomous cars, Cruise is one of the frontrunners in actually delivering on that promise.

Cruise is a self-driving vehicle service that tests and develops their own cars and technology. Instead of calling an Uber or using your own car for travel, Cruise wants their fleet of electric, self-driving vehicles to become your go-to, on-demand ride. Their use of renewable energy and always evolving, elaborate code is determined to improve air quality and make the streets accident-free.

Taking a Look at Cruise’s Journey

Since the company’s founding in 2013, Cruise has achieved some impressive milestones towards their goal. Here's a brief timeline of the company's work:

• October 2013: Founded by Kyle Vogt and Dan Kan
• January 2014: Produces a fully autonomous vehicle using the Nissan Leaf
• June 2015: Receives a permit to test self-driving vehicle technology in CA
• March 2016: Acquired by General Motors
• April 2017: General Motors invests $14 million in the company
• July 2017: 'Cruise Anywhere,' a program for SF employees to use their self-driving cars as a Rideshare service, is launched
• October 2018: Honda invests $750 million in the company
• November 2018: Dan Ammann, previous GM president, becomes the CEO
• April 2020: Cruise becomes the first self-driving company to power vehicles with 100% renewable energy
• July 2020: Cruise's self-driving fleet makes 50,000+ contactless deliveries

Since their founding, Cruise now boasts $5.3 billion in funding and 42 investors backing their mission. With their growth, they have hired around 5,000 employees across three locations – San Francisco, CA, Bellevue, WA, and Phoenix, AZ – but what is it like working at Cruise?

Working At Cruise

At a glance, Cruise offers a wide range of employee benefits including:

• Unlimited vacation time
• 10 company holidays
• Family expansion stipend
• 16 weeks of paid parental leave
• Monthly social events
• Catered breakfast and lunch
• Monthly wellness stipend
• On-site gym in the San Francisco Headquarters
• 401k Match
• CruiseCares community volunteering
• Quarterly offsites and working retreats
• Weekly demos
• Commuter benefits

On top of these benefits, the innovative tech company is a great place to work on exciting projects and learn from rare, unprecedented challenges that come with perfecting the autonomous vehicle. Due to the complex engineering work that goes into producing their cars, employees on Glassdoor have acknowledged the company’s ability to attract top-talent, who make it their mission to figure out the solutions to their intricate problems.

“The technical teams I have had the opportunity to interface with are world class. I am continually impressed by the caliber of the engineering teams at this company, and the progress has been incredible to see. I would bet on this team any day.”

According to a current employee on Glassdoor, Cruise places a lot of trust in their engineers, giving them the independence to pursue their interests within the company.

“I’ve been working at Cruise for 2 years and my favorite thing about the company is the culture of ownership such that even junior engineers are trusted with the responsibility of researching, defining, implementing, and maintaining a feature. At the intersection of research and productionization, ICs get a wide variety of experiences and the opportunity to grow their careers.”

With billion-dollar investors backing their lofty goals, the company has their eyes set on revolutionizing public transportation in big cities. However, the fast-paced nature of this mission-driven startup has led to some issues with work-life balance and company culture. In fact, after reading through workplace review sites such as Glassdoor, Indeed, and TeamBlind, current and past employees have highlighted these problems as being recurring and stressful.

Work-Life Balance

Due to the large-scale projects and rapidly evolving nature of self-driving technology, many employees have described being unable to maintain a work-life balance. With tight deadlines and long hours, some employees at Cruise have found it difficult to create boundaries between their personal and professional lives. According to one review on Glassdoor:

“Deadlines are insane at all times, and it’s a death march 24/7. If you’re working on a project that is considered “critical” you can expect to have no WLB [work-life balance]. If you avoid these projects you have very little work but cannot move upwards. [It creates] a culture of “heroes” where a few select people are considered the lifeblood of progress.”

Many reviewers have also noted that this imbalance creates a culture of “yes men,” in which employees feel pressured to say “yes” to any top-down requests or agree to ideas, even if they don't feel comfortable doing so.

“Sometimes we’d get ‘Kyle asks’ and had to drop everything to respond.”

Although Cruise is churning out inspiring work, it may come at the cost of a healthy work-life balance for employees, which can lead to stress and burnout.

Company Culture

A few employees on Glassdoor have described a culture of favoritism within upper management when it comes to hiring or promoting friends.

“If you’re friends with the right people, you will go far (as exemplified by the people/recruiting team leadership almost all coming from one company). On the flip side, if you upset the wrong person, you will be terminated.”

This nepotism creates a frustrating environment in which some reviewers have detailed “discourages being genuine” and has made “ruling by fear common.” Moreover, many employees have described a lack of communication channels between teams that leads to confusion.

“Bottom line, engineering collaboration isn’t so much really hard, as it is really unprioritized at Cruise, and you feel that pain of it on the day-to-day. Nobody understands the whole car except maybe 1 person at the company, maybe.”

Without proper communication among engineering teams, a former employee on Glassdoor found that tense discussions occurred when tech problems arose.

“The product roadmap is unclear and [the] work environment is pretty toxic with a lot of blame game going around.”

Changes at Cruise

Ultimately, these are issues startups must face as they scale-up their ambitions and projects, and Cruise has begun to address these struggles to raise employee satisfaction. More recent employee reviews have praised changes in internal communications, culture, and leadership within the company. A current employee on Glassdoor writes:

“Still some growing pains from hyper growth (to be expected, tbh), but lots invested in making middle managers better and new, super talented leadership adds who are making [a] huge difference in the [past] year and a half.”

Furthermore, most employees are confident in the leaders at Cruise to effectively guide the company forward as they expand.

“The top-level management team is mostly effective, transparent, smart people with strong values that align with making the company better.”

For instance, in May 2020, Cruise had to lay off nearly 8% of their workforce to reduce costs in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite these cuts, Cruise spokesman Milin Mehta announced that the company will

“continue to hire aggressively in the most critical areas within engineering, which right now means doubling down on senior leadership and senior IC roles to further support [and] improv[e] core tech objective[s].”

The company leadership seems to be refocusing the company in the areas that need the most attention during the pandemic and have been reacting to the circumstances as they evolve.

While there is still room for improvement, the company appears to be on track towards providing better infrastructure for their employees' needs. Although the growing pains of transitioning from a startup into a larger-scale company may be difficult, Cruise is proving to make those fixes to create a work environment for the employees who back their aspiring mission.

The Banner Image comes from Cruise's website, which can be found here.