Avalara reviews

Avalara has had the same CEO for 18 years, from inception, through IPO, going private, and what is expected to be a second IPO in the next few years. This has led to a legacy culture where a lot of new ideas are given lip service, but not a lot is actually done. Enterprise level initiatives are made mandatory through policy, but are left to the teams to solve on their own, leading to redundancy, inconsistency and inefficiency. The company espouses it's culture as unique and revolutionary, but in the end the culture is little more than wearing orange and telling senior leaders what a great job they're doing. No one seems to want to actually be critical of the way things are, and when you do speak up, you're just pandered to until you go away and get in line. The company is 100% vested in overseas employee growth with over 50% of employees now in India and a large portion in Brazil, only adding to the inconsistencies and inefficiencies mentioned earlier.

Employee Resource Groups are needed because there is an imbalance of pay, work/life balance, workload, etc. Those who are not white males will have no chance of moving up even if you are doing 4x the workload of your peers. They have gotten better about treating their employees but for almost my entire first year bullying severe occurred resulting in loss of wages and health issues. The company prides itself for being a competitive pay/benefits technology company. The pay is significantly lower than other technology companies. On average they pay half (in some cases a quarter) of the wages with the same expected skills in other companies. When having a promotion, they do not increase your base pay, only the amount of bonus you receive with the expectation you will take on more work and responsibility. The benefits are somewhat decent but does not include many other services covered by other companies, even the ones with non-competitive benefits. When signing the contract with agreed upon hours, it is important to stand up to management to work only the contracted hours otherwise they will have an expectation you will be working 12+ hours per day and will continue to give you a continuous workload until you work those hours. They will not give you resources, tools to help manage it, or implement your ideas to better manage the workload. When management is confronted with an issue they often will dance around it and not work to fix it. If an idea is given on how to resolve, it usually takes years of pitching before they will listen and eventually agree to it. Unfortunately at that point they will see it as their idea and not their employee's. Be prepared to give management credit for your work. Due to the issues listed above, there is a very high turnover rate within the company. I've been with the company for almost 2 years and have seen almost a complete staff turnover rate.