Gusto reviews

Fast moving - Gusto seems to have a focus on launching new products and features, but then choosing to move along to the next one after without making sure the previous product's pain issues are worked out. Throughout my entire experience working there, there was an issue where customers would have a highlighted fields error - but there wasn't anything highlighted. This was reported consistently as a pain point, but no resources were allocated to fixing it until right before I left. Even then, it was only getting started on being addressed. There are internal politics on teams, and if you want to move to a team that isn't customer facing, you had better know someone on that team as positions are rarely posted to the wider org. Engineers are given priority and special treatment - more flexible working hours, significantly higher pay, not subject to blackout periods for PTO, etc. The offboarding process was not smooth. I was not notified that I'd be losing access to an email I need for benefits related information, and I did not receive my final pay on the payday following my last with the company. The company is now over 1,000 employees, and it is very easy to get lost in the shuffle of everyone. Gusto acts like a 300 person startup still, when in actuality numbers have grown significantly while processes and culture have not kept up. There are other cons that I ran across in the few years I was working there, but I think I've said enough so far.

- EPD team is going through some rough growing pains. Overall velocity slowing down and there’s a lot of process overhead. - There’s a lot tech debt that can sometimes make development slow and painful, yet tech debt doesn’t seem to be a priority compared to churning out features. There’s a lot of legacy code (e.g. Backbone) that lives in a huge monolith and people are afraid to touch it out of fear of breaking things. There was at team created to move us toward a more service-oriented architecture, but they’ve existed for over a year now and I haven’t seen anything come out of that other than GraphQL errors that cause our build to flake. - The development experience is getting worse. It takes so long to start the app locally and there's always random issues that cause things to break. - The folks here are passionate about the mission and the work, but watch out for management expecting longer hours / extra work under the guise of “ownership mentality” without proper compensation, recognition, and leveling. Passion work only goes so far. - On a similar note, high performers are not recognized appropriately (nor are they compensated). There are no bonuses, and the difference in the annual raise for someone meeting expectations vs exceeding expectations is so negligible that it's almost insulting. - Everyone being “full stack” doesn’t scale, especially when “full stack” here means mostly back end. Need to hire for more specialized skillsets (area-specific such as mobile and front end, or stack-specific such as React and Rails) and ensure there’s a healthy mix of skillsets, especially on product teams. - Culture around low performers is too lax and some folks are taking advantage of it. When people aren't meeting expectations, it can take a long time to address it, which can bring down the morale of other teammates.