A Problematic Workplace - Senior Software Engineer Gousto Employee Review

* Gousto is a food company which picks and chooses what data it likes, with a side helping of technology. Gousto is NOT a technology company. Technology is a second class citizen and it shows. * Poor pay and benefits - The pension is based on qualifying earnings, so the headline 5% is actually 1-2% employer contribution for higher rate tax payers. Your future self will suffer. No shares on starting (unfairly, senior management and above do get them) and it’s a lottery if you do get issued shares during your time there. Salary bands are well below market rate with no bonus structure (again unfairly, Heads Of and above do get bonuses). * Non inclusive working environment - Gousto operates on the classic pyramid of diversity where the lower levels are the most diverse, and then higher levels function on tokenism and hires who toe and police the line. Whilst working here, I heard a homophobic slur casually used during a meeting (nothing was done about it), employees constantly raise issues of cultural appropriation in the Gousto product ( a mainly British, middle class and white company profiteering off of international/ethnic minority cuisines ) and nothing was or is done about it, the hiring pipelines start out fairly diverse but usually whittle down to the majority background (Caucasian), gendered expectations thrive in engineering so women are policed for their behaviour in a way that men are not, the engineering team were categorically told there is not a bonus scheme but the gender pay gap data shows that they pay bonuses (why lie?) and pay women 20p to the pound in them, and least harmful but most cringeworthy of all, there was a “guess the baby photo” competition from the leadership team, which only worked because the majority of leadership are Caucasian. * Gousto functions on gossip, cliques and blame - Everything you learn of importance will be through gossip because there’s no transparency in decision making. Cliques have formed who are privy to this exclusive information. There are limited to no safe spaces to air concerns so be careful who you talk to, as it’s unclear who is in the pocket of who. Unfortunately this is most apparent in the company-sponsored Women in Tech/Diversity & Inclusion space. * The factory engineering domain is an unhealthy working environment - High stress and pressure to work weekends/unpaid overtime during factory launches, engineering and factory teams (basically anyone but leadership) become the scapegoat for anything going wrong and factory testing is a hugely inefficient process and there is no willingness from leadership or management to learn from and improve it. Burn out is rife in this domain. * An inability from leadership to handle dissent or difficult topics - Lead/Senior engineers speaking out for the well being of their team and the business (querying out-of-hours compensation, reaffirming internal SLAs so devs aren’t overwhelmed, asking questions through the tech Q&A, proposing changes to inefficient factory launches) are reprimanded or invalidated behind their back by senior management for it, and the leadership and management team get away with it because Gousto works on a culture of artificial harmony and fear. There is no avenue to hold management or leadership accountable for company values in the same way that they are weaponised as threats against subordinates. You can find dissenting voices that try to push accountability, but they eventually leave. Ultimately, Gousto banks value off of command-and-control style leadership, running down employees mental health and savvy marketing which hides all of this. If you’re of senior level and above, you’re going to either become part of the system that maintains that, or you’re going to leave.