Toast Inc reviews

3.8

69% would recommend to a friend

(1,668 total reviews)
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Aman Narang

78% approve of CEO

67% positive business outlook

Toast Inc has an employee rating of 3.8 out of 5 stars, based on 1,668 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Toast Inc employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

2K reviews
2.0
Apr 23, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The individual contributors are super talented, collaborative, and genuinely care about doing great work, they're honestly the backbone of the Design org right now, driving both the culture and the success. The benefits at Toast are solid, although they keep pulling them back. And the company itself is working on some interesting stuff in the restaurant space. Remote work and work-life balance are definitely the biggest perks, but even those can be tough to hold onto with constantly shifting priorities and a lot of unnecessary work piling up.

Cons

The Design org is in disarray, and the blame lies squarely with leadership. The Chief Design Officer has made a series of misguided, top-down decisions that show a clear lack of fundamental understanding of design, research, or team dynamics. There is no strategic direction, no clarity, and no investment in the people doing the actual work. The culture and camaraderie that once made the Design org great has dramatically diminished in the last 2.5 years. Growth and actual people management are nonexistent. Managers are expected to focus on constantly changing strategy, leaving little time to actually develop and grow their reports. Senior leadership is judgmental in the worst way, and has no interest in ICs, they meet in person often and truly nothing ever comes of it other than a feeling of divide. Talented designers are left to flounder without guidance or support, while leadership avoids hard conversations and pretends everything is fine. Morale has plummeted...and it’s not subtle, the ROR results showed it clearly and it just continues to decline. Cutting research made this worse, nothing like losing some of the best talent and people on the team - only to be told they'll be replaced with others - to create a feeling of insecurity and apathy. The discontent across the team is loud and visible, but somehow design leadership faces zero consequences for the damage they’ve done or lack of impact they have had. Cutting research was, without exaggeration, one of the worst decisions the org could have made. It reflects a total disregard for user-centered design and a fundamental misunderstanding of what drives product quality and business value. "Anyone can do research" and a focus on Quant is not what makes a successful product or design team. Stop blindly following what the FAANG companies do and think for yourselves and what works for the Toast org. That decision alone signaled to many that leadership doesn’t respect or understand the very discipline they’re supposed to champion. This is not just a team with growing pains, this is a team being actively mismanaged by people unqualified to lead it. Until there is a complete overhaul in leadership or serious accountability, the decline will only continue.

3.0
Nov 23, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Comp, some great people still at Toast, I was able to work from home. Prior to 2024, those 3 years I spent here were so rewarding and I will always be thankful for that. The fintech side is filled with very sharp people with interesting problems to solve.

Cons

Workload - you will be over utilized. SLT strategy changes constantly. Disjointed tools. Plenty of offshoring for roles. Opportunities for pay increase/promotion is getting sparse due to cost cutting. There will be any reason to minimize your impact in performance reviews to prevent justified pay increases or stock grants. My last review held me accountable to something I had no control over, which prevented stock grants and a real pay increase. It was disappointing. Also, there are a lot of folks in positions they are too junior for. Finance department is lost. There are numerous projects in flight and are all running at P0. But, the roadmap and change management is awful. It's thrown by the wayside to just cross the finish line. Turbulent job security. People have recently left over the past few months to "take a break" or "spend time with family." So, everyone just works long hours out of fear of being leg go. CEO - hinted at some form of RTO for "collaboration." But, it's being disguised as "ways we work." Many are conscious about "being negative." However, being negative is deemed just not fully falling in line with something. If you value your job, don't question, don't even respectfully disagree, just fall in line. Sad but true.

2.0
May 6, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Friendly company culture (mostly). Fun amenities in-office (if you ever had time to enjoy them). I personally had one EXCEPTIONAL trainer, a pretty good manager, and a higher-up adjacent to my division who was always extremely down-to-earth and helpful, even amid "red alert" times. The company Slack had channels for various types of socializing and for coworker support RE: the BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities and those with chronic illness, among others. For most departments, there was scheduled time for training and other "career growth" activities, but...that brings me to my first big Con of working at Toast...

Cons

Con #1: As the abovementioned scheduled "career growth" time was only allowed pending lower call-volume-to-available-agents ratios, most of my cohorts in the Payments division (including myself) rarely--if ever--got to utilize that time for as long as I was at Toast. The above stipulation is an understandable one; a company can't exist for long without satisfied customers who aren't forced to wait tens or hundreds of minutes for assistance. But the Payments division was not at all sufficiently staffed to meet that goal of little-to-no customer wait time AND high-quality assistance from agents. Con #2: Metrics WERE tightened for ALL support divisions after the IPO, but all support divisions were then being measured by the SAME metrics (while I was working there at least). This contributed heavily to the Payments division's metrics (particularly metrics of total call time, on-hold time, and casework wrap-up time) look consistently terrible in comparison to other divisions such as Hardware and Networking. On top of getting some of the most panicky and/or vitriolic, expletive-brandishing, abusive callers, Payments also often had to contend with extremely complicated questions (many factors involved including restaurants' on-site cash management, credit card processing, and customer billing); it was ludicrous to try and evaluate the division's overall efficacy using the same time metrics as Hardware or Menus. (On the flip side, Payments' CSAT scores were generally comparable to other divisions, and I was personally told by customers at least once or twice per shift that I was the most helpful agent at Toast that they had ever worked with, that I actually helped them solve their issues and empowered them for the future.) Con #3: Sort of a culmination of Cons #1 and #2. I was friends with Toast coworkers across almost every other customer support division; the majority of them had time to get up and stretch, to make use of the in-office amenities, and to actually put time and energy into growing within the company (i.e., make use of their scheduled "career growth" time and to organically network with other employees). This was rarely if ever the case for those of us in Payments, and on top of being charged with some of the most abusive callers (because they were most often calling when furious about money matters), it *stung* so sharply that we were seemingly left behind while other (also hard-working) divisions were thriving. Con #4: It took so long for my work technology stipend to be approved that I was never actually able to use it while at Toast (the people approving these were random, it seemingly had nothing to do with cohorts that had the same starting date). Con #5: I also had issues with Toast-issued tech; I did my best to make things work with what I had while also (in my free time) researching what the cause(s) might be and what solutions might be available to me. I *did* discover the issue (there was a difference in the tech's internal components in what was issued to my "class" versus those who had started earlier that year). But it took me *months* to get anyone with power to issue me replacement tech to even believe that I was correct in my assessment (and I provided every kind of evidentiary support I could, including photos I'd taken, screenshots from manufacturer websites, step-by-step troubleshooting I'd done). Several people tried to help me "figure it out, it's just kinda tricky" without replacing my tech only to go "oh...huh, that's weird, it's not working." It was so frustrating to be repeatedly dismissed only to then have multiple people come to the same conclusion I had.

Viewing 94 - 96 of 1,668 Reviews

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