Paycom

If no one else will hire you because they require previous experience, you can work at Paycom to gain that experience and an appreciation of how a company should not be run.

After 4 years, you will have 5 weeks of vacation, 2 weeks of sick time, and other paid time off such as bereavement, but you will be punished for taking this time.

Any PTO is recorded as non-capitalized time, and is therefore not worth any development points, which will bring down your monthly amount. This prevents you from meeting your expected job requirements and might lead to you getting placed on a performance improvement plan and eventually fired.

Chad Richison, the CEO of Paycom at the time of writing this review (hopefully not by the time you read this), is a tyrannical dictator that fires people on a whim and makes decisions based on emotions rather than logical consideration.

The most glaring offense is his surprise announcement in December 2022 that everyone must return to the office and stop working remotely. Most departments only had a few weeks to comply, but some technical roles, such as software development, were given half a year. When we arrived at the office, we found disorganization and chaos. That was a year ago, and even now, no one gets any work done in the cube farm due to the distractions and general disappointment in Paycom.

Productivity plummeted after forcing people back into the office, but Paycom leadership is incapable of admitting that they have ever made any mistakes, so they continue to blame and fire QA testers and product managers.

There has been a recent announcement that leadership will be "cracking down on badge scans," although no one is quite sure what this will mean, other than leadership wants people sitting at their desks in the office building because leadership is incapable of realizing that employees sitting at their desks are not necessarily working.

There is currently a class-action lawsuit against Paycom for cannibalization of earnings.

The primary codebase is a monolithic pile of technical debt that causes any new developments to be riddled with bugs and unexpected behavior. The most rewarded programming style is to throw out as much code as possible and patch bugs later. This style is particularly encouraged at "code-a-thon," an annual voluntary weekend of working for trinkets and breadcrumbs.

In the last several months, every software development team got shuffled around so no one is familiar with the parts of code they are now responsible for. We also have no time to figure it out, as whoever got what we were once familiar with is constantly asking us how that piece works.

The turnover rate is extremely high, and 99% of new hires are fresh college graduates. If you have worked a software development job before, please spare yourself this misery.

Bring back remote work.

Stop punishing employees that actually use their paid time off.

Stop randomly firing people.

Stop rushing projects out and pay off some technical debt.

Learn at least the basics of accepted industry patterns of software development or find people who understand them.