Gusto

Culture is warm. Everyone is incredibly friendly and there are no jerks here.

People are passionate about the mission, which leads to very user-centric product development processes. The work here is crucial to helping thousands of small businesses around the country operate. The product directly impacts people’s livelihoods, which feels very rewarding (but sometimes stressful when things go wrong).

Benefits are fantastic. 100% contribution for medical. Dental and vision are very inexpensive. FSA/HSA/life/disability are all available as add-ons. Lots of commuter options, including a monthly Uber credit that can be used on any kind of Uber (though it was added to offset the Dogpatch location that’s more difficult to get to).

Company is on a rocket ship trajectory with tons of growth. Feels like there are dozens of new faces at every company all-hands meeting. Customer base is growing quickly.

Engineering team has a great culture of learning and development. Each engineer has a generous L&D budget that can be used for workshops, conferences, books, etc. Most people who use it are able to travel to one or two conferences a year.

Solid leadership at the top. The co-founders are all still here and have built out a stellar executive team.

Overall culture of transparency (one of our company values).

Beautiful open office in a converted warehouse. Lots of soft seating around the office. Meeting rooms are all set up to be remote-friendly.

Delicious lunch and dinner that’s catered daily (except dinner on Fridays).

Great snacks and drinks (though quality has been noticeably declining, but they’re still great for now).

Flexible WFH policy.

The EPD team is going through some rough growing pains. Overall velocity is slowing down, and there’s a lot of process overhead.

There’s a lot of tech debt that can sometimes make development slow and painful. Yet, tech debt doesn’t seem to be a priority compared to churning out features. There’s a lot of legacy code (e.g., Backbone) that lives in a huge monolith, and people are afraid to touch it out of fear of breaking things. A team was created to move us toward a more service-oriented architecture, but they’ve existed for over a year now, and I haven’t seen anything come out of that other than GraphQL errors that cause our build to flake.

The development experience is getting worse. It takes so long to start the app locally, and there are always random issues that cause things to break.

The folks here are passionate about the mission and the work, but watch out for management expecting longer hours or extra work under the guise of an “ownership mentality” without proper compensation, recognition, and leveling. Passion work only goes so far.

On a similar note, high performers are not recognized appropriately, nor are they compensated. There are no bonuses, and the difference in the annual raise for someone meeting expectations versus exceeding expectations is so negligible that it's almost insulting.

Everyone being “full stack” doesn’t scale, especially when “full stack” here means mostly back end. We need to hire for more specialized skillsets (area-specific such as mobile and front end, or stack-specific such as React and Rails) and ensure there’s a healthy mix of skillsets, especially on product teams.

The culture around low performers is too lax, and some folks are taking advantage of it. When people aren't meeting expectations, it can take a long time to address it, which can bring down the morale of other teammates.

I’m glad many of the cons I pointed out are things that are starting to be addressed due to new leadership, but ideally they could have been addressed earlier to prevent them from becoming larger issues.

Keep collecting feedback from everyone in all levels and roles; important information is lost when feedback is just collected from team leads.

Continue to hire the right people and ensure that high performers are properly compensated and recognized while low performers are actually addressed. Hold people accountable. Prioritize addressing tech debt and improving the developer experience.