Toast

Flexibility in WFH One of the best health insurance plans 400 euro bi-annual voucher to spend on home office / amenities 1050 euro education stipend 900 home office stipend which has been deprecated as of May 2024 and has been replaced by the 400 euro bi-annual voucher Often breakfast / lunch from various customer restaurants of Toast in Dublin Often team events Often volunteering opportunities with Toast.org Very nice volunteering program where each employee receives 25 euro to donate to a selected charity through Toast.org 4 weeks sabbatical after 5 years of service In office snacks / coffee / drinks (alcohol and soft) Rich parental leave program All the other standard benefits - Tax Save / Bike To Work

Toast's unlimited PTO is a tale. When I started, it was promoted as unlimited; however, that quickly changed to be flexible. Toast gives 20 days statutory PTO, which is a rolling balance, and any days in excess of that are at the manager's discretion.

Non-production environments are a nightmare, often non-functional due to too much freedom to release breaking changes. This has often caused days of delays trying to figure out why pre-production is unstable and non-functional, leading to high levels of frustration and low morale in the team.

Some technical decisions are questionable and non-logical. One of them being that DynamoDB is being pushed for everything.

LaunchDarkly is being used as a feature flag across Toast, even for non-product features, which makes absolutely no sense.

One downside of Dublin is that directors, especially in Fintech, try to promote a culture of zero outages/accidents, which leads to engineers being reluctant to declare an incident. This isn't the case with their US counterparts.

Create a thriving engineering team. Foster a culture of trust and autonomy. Empower engineers to own their work and make decisions, boosting innovation. Move beyond metrics like PR count and evaluate based on the impact their work has on the product and team goals. Break down silos and celebrate collaboration. Actively listen to concerns and promote open communication. Finally, leverage Toast's core value of inclusivity by involving the entire team in planning from the beginning. Their insights are essential for building better features, and this collaborative approach empowers everyone to deliver their best work. They are the ones who know the product best.