Vantaggi
PayScale at one time had a great culture, great work environment, and pushed for a transparent pay process because they believed in their own mission. New leadership came in after a new VC took over and burned all that to the ground.
Svantaggi
New Leadership came in and decided to remove pay ranges and compensation reports from the increase cycles. What was once a transparent and straightforward process became a black box that caused your manager to have to read a script to try and deflect reasonable questions. Employee: “Why aren’t we sharing our pay ranges, fair market pay reports, or really doing anything that encompasses our company mission anymore?” Manager: “It says here that we have to take a step back to take a step forward.” Engineers had their goals tossed out the window and were suddenly stack ranked or graded on a curve against each other. So on a team of 3 one would be ranked low, one medium, and one high. If you got marked with a low rank then you got to receive your bonus on February 31st, even if you met and exceeded all your goals. And the managers didn’t get to choose which of their employees get put in which of the ranks because someone mysterious from above got to. Manager: “It says here that we have a culture of competition.” Employee: “So I need to stop helping the other engineers and just let them ship bugs so I look better to get a raise and a promotion?” Manager: “... I see… there’s no response for that on this sheet… umm… how about a nice day off to make you feel better, huh?” New leadership decided to fire a significant chunk of the company two years in a row in April (once on April fools day). Then because of such bad morale, poor transparency, poor culture adjustments, and just overall poor leadership everyone started leaving so they had to try and hire a lot of these laid off people back. LinkedIn has the #hiring badge but I think PayScale needed the #firing badge. As people were fired / laid off in masses and as people started leaving in masses there was no effort made to replace anyone to help with the workload. In one meeting a top engineering leader had no idea that the product manager on one of the teams had left two weeks prior and that they had no planning or roadmap and no direction. Another team hadn’t had a product manager or even an engineering manager for 3 or 4 months. Surprisingly everyone on these teams left. Employee: “It looks like this isn’t a culture of competition but a culture of incompetence” Compensation at PayScale is lower than the rest of the market. You would work here for the work / life balance and the culture in the past. Those are gone so now it's just a company where you get paid less. The employee stock plan is so bad they might as well just give you a bunch of pieces of paper that say “LOL REKT” on them instead of the options. The company’s success does not mean your success. Employee: leaves company, gets paid at fair market, and works for a company that believes in it’s own mission
