Gusto

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

• 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.

Come back to reality on LLM hype. You're not going to IPO in the next 2-3 years. Who are you trying to impress, and who is going to care if you were slow on it? You run payroll, for goodness' sake.

Refocus on being an engineer-led org instead of this weird public arousal you insist on when it comes to replacing engineering headcount with LLMs.

Stop making every meeting about LLMs. It would be nice to talk about Gusto again.