If you care about your sanity, career growth, or a decent work-life balance, avoid Paycom. My time there was an absolute disaster from start to finish.
The toxic culture starts at the top with the CEO and seeps into every level of management. It’s a blame game all the way down, with individual contributors and client-facing managers always taking the fall for problems they didn’t cause. Managers and teams are so overworked with endless documentation that there’s zero support for anyone.
The company claims to offer flexibility, but that’s a joke. If you’re sick, you’re still expected to work in the office. Want to work from home? You’ll have to burn your sick days. What they tell you about the culture during hiring couldn’t be further from reality.
The internal tools are just as bad. The project management software is full of bugs, required to use, and pointless because other departments don’t even bother keeping it updated. And forget about modern tools—AI, useful Outlook features, or anything that would make your job easier just don’t exist here.
Sales constantly sells to the wrong customers, promising impossible timelines and “hands-free” implementation. When things inevitably go wrong, the implementation team gets blamed. On top of that, the amount of clawbacks on your bonus ranges from several hundred dollars to thousands for implementations that took 4-6 months of work.
The office setup isn’t much better. The hardware is laughable, and good luck finding a private room to focus on—it’s a scramble every day. Coordinators are unreliable, often fresh out of college, and most don’t last longer than a few months before getting fired. Meanwhile, half of the Tax department was fired during my time there, which caused massive delays of multiple days, resulting in loss of bonus.
Leadership is a revolving door. While I was there, my department had three different heads—two were fired, and one was demoted. The CEO even made headlines for terrible treatment of employees during an audio leak. They tried to save face by hiring a Co-CEO, but that person quit after six weeks.
The cherry on top is the ridiculous hoops you have to jump through just to get approval for something as simple as not forcing a client to implement a product they don’t want (customer-obsessed? lol). You have to provide email proof, get confirmation from an SE, record a video of the client rejecting the product, and submit it all for approval to three levels of management. It’s as insane as it sounds.
On top of all that, the constant meetings, documentation, status updates, and Teams messages leave you with no time to actually help customers. And don’t expect any kind of professional development—there are zero opportunities for growth here (it was great in the 2010's).
Paycom doesn’t do layoffs because they don’t want to pay severance, but that just means they rely on burning you out until you quit. This place is a churn and burn company where people go to hate their jobs and their lives. Stay far away.
