Guidewire

The company has a good path to the cloud and a great future.

Transformation increased the speed of development.

San Mateo office has some great managers.

The company is not bad:

• at identifying places where our products may be better.
• in knowing how to give customers a shorter time to market.

Great people in KDC and the San Mateo office (probably also in other offices; personally, I didn't meet many people from other offices, so I may only guess).

Great people in the Services and OPS team.

The Kraków office is working on an interesting domain (at least for now).

Most of the opinions here are for part of the Kraków office working on tooling for cloud solutions.

On-call. It is unpaid because "it is legal in Poland" and because "US is doing it for free". If you are "lucky", you may be in one of those teams where you will have the privilege to have on-call, and additionally the chance to do deployments to production every 2 weeks, starting at 6 am. Without any extra cash. Those who will join other teams will get exactly the same money you will get, exactly the same LTI, and probably even a better bonus than you, but without this unpaid on-call. But don't despair, it is only one time in 10 days or so, and it will be only 12 hours. You will manage, and you are building the future of the company... or maybe not, because everyone in the company sees your work as something done in the US. If you are not a Senior and would like to work on Cloud, this may be very good for you; you will have very fast learning on how to fight with production issues. If you are Senior and have a family, look for a team without on-call. This team pays the same, has the same LIT, and probably a better bonus.

Promotions are not clear. Some people are promoted when they show an offer from another company. Others are not promoted even when they deserve it because "they are too young", "were promoted last year", and so on.

Women are not promoted as often as men. Some need to wait 3-4 years for promotions which their male peers get after 1-2 years. Some don't get such promotions even after this time. In the whole history of the office, only one woman was promoted to Senior Software Engineer, and it was done by a manager from the US. Most women in development were promoted when the office was managed by a manager from the US. This is not a coincidence. This was a people manager. Currently, none of the L2s know people in the office, so they are seeing only loud people.

Recruitment is a mess. We had situations when we lost great candidates because we didn't want to pay them as much as they would like. At the same time, we were and are giving to mediocre engineers already working in the company much more than those candidates expected. Recruiters have favorite interviewers and use them for a big chunk of interviews. At the same time, other interviewers are waiting months to get a chance to perform an interview. Some candidates are managed by recruiters from Dublin, some by a recruiter from KDC.

If you are young and look for a company where you may learn fast, join one of the "cloud" teams. This will be a crash course in cloud and firefighting. If you are older and have a family, you will be better off looking for one of the teams working on the UI library.