Gusto reviews

Top-talent quickly comes and goes: shelf life for top performers is about a year. Company leadership frequently takes actions and makes decisions that go directly against the company's stated mission and vision. The diversity and inclusion focus has reached the level of obsession: it is the sole form of employee engagement offered at work. Top talent has been leaving the company for years now. What is being left behind is a 'neither here nor there' dead layer of middle management that lacks basic business and technology fundamentals. There are a lot of immature and inexperienced 'head of' folks that simply do not know how to do the work required for their role. A typical 'head of' leader looks like 1) Elite school 2) 2 to 3 years as an IC at a famous company then 3) 1 to 2 years at Gusto then TA-DA 'head of' product, marketing, data science, etc. There is no career path through middle management. If you have a wealth of previous experience before coming to Gusto and are not a 'head of' upon arrival at Gusto, your subject matter expertise will be rejected, resisted and refused. For example, you may find yourself spending hours explaining to a senior manager why due dates are a good thing, only to have them escalate to a 'head of' leader who decides that the project stakeholders that don't want to adhere to deadlines don't have to.

Very metrics focused in evaluations, claims not to be. You'll never meet or interact with most of the people evaluating you. They rarely promote people. If they promote you, that mean's you've been doing the promoted job already for at least a year without matching pay. Location (in San Francisco) isn't very good. Teams don't always have clear purposes or missions, and they change often. Every team everywhere is at full bandwidth all the time, usually with months of roadmap. If you need code written in some other team's area, the best you'll get is them advising you while you write it. Engineering support members (design, research, product, etc.) occasionally change at random with no notice or reason. Biggest con is that they've been fighting various fires non-stop for months. I wouldn't be shocked if they're out of business in a year or two.