Toast

Benefits are decent. The main HQ location is great. The product itself is easy to believe in, as it is truly a great product. Free beer.

Oh boy, where to begin...

For starters, the culture is absolutely toxic. People are not accepting of others with contrasting opinions. If you don't fit the consensus, you're an outcast. Multiple times I've overheard racist, sexist, etc., conversations taking place in the elevators and common areas of the office. I've raised issues with this and received no support from my managers, occasionally being told that I need to just bite the bullet and apologize for disagreeing.

Work-life balance sucks. Everyone talks a big game about it, but when it comes down to it, people are regularly working late at night, on weekends, and while on vacation. An unlimited vacation policy is useless when you work during the vacation (personally, I think "unlimited" vacation policies are an intrinsic evil, but not everyone agrees).

My base salary is fine (though not extraordinary) in my opinion, but there are no bonuses, equity, or other monetary benefits beyond base salary available. I've heard many others complain about poor pay at Toast. I don't know if they are upset about salary or the lack of additional benefits.

By far the worst thing about working at Toast, though, is that the leadership does not seem to care about the employees. There was an issue with air quality in the office due to an ongoing remodel. It took 2 weeks of employees complaining of headaches, nausea, and other symptoms, and an employee purchasing an air quality monitor out of their own pocket to get readings (which was subsequently confiscated without a reasonable explanation), before anything was done. What was done was to close the floor and move everyone off-site, but not before making it explicitly clear to everyone not closely involved already that, in leadership's opinion, there was no danger and the move was being done mainly as a result of the complaining, as opposed to out of concern for employee safety. There was a clear adversarial relationship between the employees affected by the air quality issues and the workplace experience team that was supposed to be mitigating it.

Note: I left the company voluntarily and was NOT part of the recent COVID-19 layoffs.

Care about your employees. They are the lifeblood of your company. You have an excellent product and some talented people, but if you continue to foster a bad culture, you're going to lose those people.