The culture that once made this place special is deterioriating - Anonymous employee PaperCut Software Employee Review

- Very few opportunities for growth and development. There is an advancement ceiling outside of Australia, with leadership constantly hired in above and zero effort to cultivate existing talent - Extremely poor middle management. Most managers are incredibly overburdened with too many reports, too many meetings, too many competing priorities. You will get nowhere unless you push for it, hard - CEO (also the sole owner and sole remaining founder) is very poorly liked and is well-known for micromanaging reports. He does not have a desk at the Melbourne office and instead spends his days walking around the office watching over people's shoulders. He is also both the CEO and the Head of Product. Everyone seems to be in agreement that him having this dual role is detrimental to the company's success and culture - Poorly defined company strategy that even executives struggle to concisely articulate, far too many competing priorities and far too much tendency to drop everything to handle a hot issue - Poor psychological safety, especially for marginalized people. I know too many people who have burned out or are burning out. I also know of too many cases of unacceptable workplace behaviour that have been left largely unaddressed. There are, too, cases that have been sufficiently addressed. But just too many exceptions for it to feel like a truly safe workplace - PaperCut states a lot of values that it fails to live by. While it is a B Corp and espouses care for DEIB and for the environment, these initiatives are nearly entirely lip service at this point. I believe at one point they were genuine initiatives but most of the people responsible for driving them have either become overburdened by BAU work (which is expressly prioritised), been laid off, or quit. I think the degree to which the values are lived also depends on which office location you work at, the Americas office being significantly better than either of the other two offices - Large gender pay gap that speaks to pervasive workplace misogyny. I guess this is the norm in the corporate world, though! - PaperCut has made it mandatory for employees to come in 3 days a week (recently upped from 2). This change has been met with significant, persistent feedback, but all of this feedback has been ignored, at times extremely pointedly. The policy is also incredibly haphazardly applied, as many senior managers are fully remote, while their reports are forced to come into the office. It's an odd dynamic to be required to show up when your boss isn't even there. It also creates a feeling of locked-in hierarchy, especially as requests to go remote from existing employees are met with extensive bureaucracy - My compensation was just under living wage. I was significantly undercompensated per the company's own schema but that schema is so obtuse and management so absent that it was hard to advocate on my own behalf - Overwork is highly normalised. Many of my coworkers worked upwards of 10-20 hours of overtime every week without additional compensation (most roles are salaried) - Reviews and promotions process is incredibly opaque and your ability to achieve a promotion seems to depend on who your manager is - Constant change in my job responsibilities, constant arguments between managers over what it should entail - The C-suite is entirely white and the only woman is the head of HR (there are women on the advisory board, but as an employee it was incredibly unclear how much remit they have) - C-suite executives have openly commented that burnout of senior staff is inevitable on account of the CEO's commitment to a churn-and-burn strategy. Disagreement between C-suite executives is incredibly plain to see