Pros: Good work-life balance, good culture, friendly people.

Cons: Tech is a bit outdated, the stack is messy, management kinda sucks, and compensation is lower.

Pros: - Decent comp. - Higher level staff can WFH, but only 3 out of 5 days.

Cons: - No hope of IPO and liquidity events are rare. - Talent is leaving, but slowly due to a crummy job market. - Refusal to address underlying infrastructure issues in favor of new features that release to mixed customer reception. - The company tracks the number of PRs opened, closed, and merged as a performance metric, and promotions have already been given based on these metrics. - Directionless AI mandates. Every engineer meeting is about how LLMs will replace us, but then there is no official guidance on what we are supposed to do and what processes require LLMs in a mandatory sense. - Increasing pressure on performance, with associated metrics now being tracked, but the metrics are useless. - C-Suite and Board of Directors are heavy LLM boosters with ties to other LLM companies. - Official communications state LLMs will take over the entire software lifecycle and error handling recovery aspects of the job, which seems dangerous given the sensitivity of data that we handle.

Pros: Even as it grows, Gusto is an amazing place to work. There are common growing pains that are necessary as a company scales as quickly as Gusto has, but they constantly try to measure and take feedback every month to find what's working and what is not. This level of care definitely makes for a comfortable environment to work in every day.

Cons: There are not many downsides to working at Gusto. The biggest for my department is probably work-life balance. There's no problem with going home after (or even before) dinner, but if you want to take on big projects, you'll see the people that usually do are the ones that stay late all the time.