Not at all what they made themselves out to be - Senior Software Engineer Xero Employee Review

2.0
Jul 29, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Good WLB - Full remote - Team members are lovely

Cons

- Tech stack is outdated - "best practices" used at Xero are VERY outdated - dev pace is extremely slow - expect to spend a lot of time maintaining a lot of services that provide very little functionality and are heavily over engineered - expect to spend a substantial amount of time documenting what you did so you can prove that you did it in your performance review, rather than focusing on actual code - the quality of code for 'modernised' apps is painful - engineers spend more time discussing nitpicks and how to name a variable appropriately rather than shipping code - expect to have substantial back and forth conversations that seem to exist for the sake of existing instead of actually working on the product - simply getting to ship code is inordinately slow - the performance rating process is easily the worst i have seen in many decades of tech. do not bother working on things that won't contribute to your goals, you will not be rewarded for those activities. - they will gaslight you and say its not stack ranking. it is. - obsession with putting AI in every business process for the sake of putting it in, the company is suffering from the same homogenization that US 'big tech' is following. the culture here is no different from other big blue tech companies. and the pay is worse than a lot of them.

Explore other reviews about Xero

5.0
Apr 24, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great culture and solid benefits

Cons

Could be a bit chaotic at times

1
1.0
Jun 30, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Xero has a great product and a lot of very passionate employees who work very hard for their customers.

Cons

The executive leadership at Xero is creating a toxic, backstabbing culture that promotes yes-men at the expense of honest dialogue. It's impossible to make decisions at the company, and multiple rounds of layoffs are leaving all employees shell shocked and fearful. Marketing teams are under-resourced while more demands are constantly being placed on teams to do more. When constraints are communicated, employees are blamed for them, rather that listened to. Multiple colleagues have said the same thing. Additionally, management has instituted a 'rank and yank' policy where everyone is graded on a forced curve, where the bottom quarter are immediately put on a PIP.

1
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