Issue #1: Unethical Compensation
Pluralsight changed total comp from a 90/10 split down to an 80/20 split of base salary and bonus. This resulted in a salary reduction for everyone on the 90/10 split. They changed again down to 75/25 split. It would be ok if they did this for all new hires moving forward, but each time, changed current employees compensation too.
A new compensation plan for quarterly bonus was launched first quarter in 2022. The comp plan is excessively complex, to the point that leadership struggles to explain it clearly to the customer success teams. It seems to me, and other coworkers, that the finance department has "interpreted" the comp plan very differently than the success department, resulting in significantly lower payouts than what was actually earned according to the plan details. Super shady.
In my tenure, we have continuously been informed of so many different positive changes that were going to take place in future comp plans that would benefit customer success employees, to see none of them come to fruition. The comp plan will now be changed again in the middle of the year, either this quarter or next.
As an example, the Flow product is still taken into account as a part of the bonus plan for csms that do not own Flow. We were told all of last year that Flow would be dropped from the bonus responsibility this year, and that failed to happen. So when accounts do not renew their Flow contracts, the csm that just owns Skills and ACG takes the hit despite having a separate Flow CSM who is responsible for driving the successful adoption and renewal of that product. It makes no sense.
Issue #2: No cross department support from IT, Finance, Salesforce Administrators, Legal, AR, etc.
Discover an operational issue with your laptop that you cannot resolve on your own? Need an incorrect opportunity fixed in Salesforce? Need to change a renewal contract with a client through the legal department?
Whenever you run into a problem that needs to be resolved in order to do your day to day work that requires another department to facilitate and process, it seems that the supporting departments are usually either non responsive, extremely delayed in their reply (weeks later), or unable to fix the issue. Unfortunately, having your boss escalate these issues does not result in a different outcome.
Conclusion:
The Vista buyout has changed the culture for the worse. It seems that extreme cost cutting measures have been undertaken, resulting in not paying CSMs what they were getting before in base salary or what they actually earned in variable comp, and the cost cutting also seems to have reduced supporting departments down to skeleton crews that do not have the capacity to handle the workload. Turnover has been at an all time high in the past year.
Pluralsight was a great company to work for before the Vista acquisition, and is now just a shell of what it used to be.
