Toast

Compensation is pretty good; stock popped off, so that was awesome.

Culture is inclusive, making me feel comfortable and safe.

There are many smart mid-level to senior engineers I enjoyed working with.

They try to be forward-thinking with their tech stack and decision-making, building tools, UI standards, that sort of thing.

• They laid off like half my team in Feb 2024 after an unpopular reorg. This is the second layoff that I know of in Toast's history.

• No sense of code/user flow ownership. You have to ask six teams, "Hey, do you own [insert user action here]?" And a lot of the time, you'll find the team that owns it and they'll say it's legacy and they don't understand it themselves.

• Depending on the team, you'll have to learn 5+ languages and 7+ frameworks. You'll constantly be context switching, and they refuse to get big customers off legacy flows, so you have to support two versions of everything.

• If your team is good and successful, you will be burdened with other teams' issues. Being good at your job is punished. You'll be expected to help constantly with other teams' bugs and other teams' projects, even if that team is larger than your team, because "Oh, you guys can handle it, you guys are great! We don't have enough resources ourselves." And then, your team is burnt out and angry all the time.

• So many bugs, so many broken issues that leadership doesn't care about, but you have to fix. Agents who deal with customer issues are allowed to just ping whoever and bother you, even if you're on PTO. There is zero structure here.

• Standardize the red flag process.
• Set up clear documentation of who owns what software/flows/etc. No Google Docs nonsense that is hard to find and no one updates.