The Asana Engineering team: Meet Mike Morearty

From individual contributors to managers and program leads, every engineer at Asana is encouraged to pursue a path to success that leads them to be most successful in their role. To give you a look into our engineering org, we’ve put together a series of blog posts to help you get to know our teammates. They’ll focus on people in different roles, from different backgrounds, and with different perspectives. We hope you enjoy meeting a few members of our team!

Meet Mike, a member of the Developer Efficiency team. He joined Asana in 2015.

Tell me about your career. What did your path look like before you came to Asana?

So I’ve had a long career. I spent about 10 years at Microsoft, then about 10 years at Adobe, and I was at Box for a couple of years. I also did some contract-based work in between. I’ve been at a range of big, small, and medium-sized companies.

I like medium-sized companies because they have a lot of stability, yet offer a lot of freedom to have a big impact on the company.

What originally drew you to apply to Asana?

A big part of it was the reputation Asana has for its culture and very strong engineering team. It’s fun as an engineer to work with really talented people who feel like your peers and who you can learn from.

What do you work on?

I’m on a small team called Developer Efficiency. We’re focused on internal developers, making their lives as awesome as we can by having fast build and test cycles and good tools in general. I’m a tools guy—I’ve always been a tools guy—and I’ve always loved working on them. It’s fun because my audience is my coworkers and they’re always happy when things get faster.

Our team is really valuable to the company because when developers are able to have a fast turnaround cycle, they’re so much more efficient and it just feels better. They don’t have to worry about, “Oh, let me write the code carefully, and push it to testing and hope it works.”

Before joining the developer efficiency team, I worked on some front-end teams. It proved really valuable to gain a sense of what issues developers come up against when I moved teams.

You’re an individual contributor (IC). What do you like about being an IC?

I think it comes down to the fact that I love coding. Even after all these years, I’m still learning all the time. I still get a real thrill out of writing good code. Being an IC doesn’t mean that you’re working in isolation—I love sharing things I know, and I’ve found I’m just really good at that.

At Asana, we’re happy to let people remain ICs if that’s what they want to do. The fact that we don’t have titles makes it easier to define your own version of success.

Also, I have conversations all the time with engineers who used to be ICs and are now in management roles. I tell them about something cool I’m doing, and they’re like, “Oh man, I wish I had time to do that… ” So I’m happy with where I’ve landed for now.

Why do you look forward to coming to work every day?

This is a place where I can do my thing. I can write great code while surrounded by people who are extremely talented and supportive.

Join the team

If you’d like to work with folks like Mike, have a look at our open positions.