Pros
-The co-CEOs really care about the employees. They know everyone's name, and often remember the names of people's partners and/or children. When covid lockdowns were first happening, the CEOs stopped receiving salary for a while to ensure that everyone would be able to get paid. They came up with a plan to ensure that they wouldn't need to let anyone go during covid, even if it meant giving everyone a temporary pay cut (that was a "worst case scenario" that was laid out that didn't end up happening). At the end of 2020, everyone got a $5000 bonus (on top of potentially getting a year-end discretionary bonus) from all of the savings that the company had from being fully remote, too, which was really nice. -On a similar vein, leadership tries to be very transparent. There are monthly company meetings where we hear about how the company is doing financially, what business we're thinking of pursuing, etc. When covid lockdowns happened, we also heard about plans A-Z that the company had for weathering covid, which was very comforting. -GSG encourages people to talk to upper management (including the CEOs) if they'd like to. The CEOs in particular are always receptive to ideas, and will never punish anyone for speaking up about something to them -GSG allows for people to work fully remotely (and has allowed for this even before covid), and knows how to manage having remote employees well -Coworkers are generally all nice and talented people -People are given a lot of trust/autonomy/responsibility, and there isn't any micromanagement -GSG tries to aggressively cut down on the number of unnecessary meetings
Cons
-Although the CEOs are open to people talking to them about problems that they see in the company, the same cannot be said for everyone in management. Some middle managers in particular often will label people who have opinions on things as being "uncooperative" rather than listening to what they have to say. Or, they will come up with data that they can spin in a way that seems to discount the employee's concerns (in addition to labeling the employee as being "uncooperative"). -Middle management will sometimes say something, but not live up to it. For example, middle management will tell employees to talk to them if they're feeling stressed or overwhelmed, so that they can have a conversation about what can be taken off of the employee's plate. However, if people actually talk to middle management, they will basically pressure people into doing all of the work anyways. -Expectations seem like they're unclear sometimes. I've seen some people be fired who I thought were performing just as well (if not better) than some employees who are still at the company. -GSG seems to value speed a lot more than quality. As a smaller company, this is somewhat understandable since we're trying to get clients live quickly. However, it can be frustrating. -GSG values efficiency a lot, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. However, sometimes this can lead to timelines with little to no wiggle-room, depending on what team you're on. For some teams, for example, tickets are often sized in hours, and it seems like the question asked when estimating tickets is, "if someone were absolutely laser-focused on this ticket and was familiar with this area of the code, how long would it take to do this ticket if everything went smoothly?" After tickets are estimated, the question that's asked when assigning tickets is "how many non-meeting hours does this developer have? We shall assign this developer enough tickets to fill all of those hours." That's a bit of an exaggeration, but that's what it feels like sometimes. -The base salary is relatively low, even taking into account that this company is based out of Pittsburgh. The company does try to make up for this with year-end bonuses, but bonuses are not guaranteed (having said that though, I have received a bonus every year so far).
