Pros
There are some truly great people that still work there. The business used to have a company value of “leadership from everywhere” and you really saw it show up from places you wouldn’t expect. It was great to see. Compensation is a culturally-relevant topic that impacts everyone. So working for a company that focuses on improving how businesses think about compensating their employees and moving towards a transparent conversation with good data is a great thing to push for. That has historically been PayScale’s motto.
Cons
They will claim they have top tier executive leadership. But the business has been mismanaged by Francisco Partners and the leadership they brought in in 2019. The new CEO and CFO that were brought in last fall were both brand new to the title, and their lack of experience quickly showed. They came in with big egos and completely misidentified the business’s strengths and weaknesses, and pushed for unattainable growth targets. They came in thinking they knew how to run the business better than the outgoing execs, and undervalued the experience and knowledge that still existed in the business. It caused tenured employees with know-how, and industry experience to start leaving. You can see from the other reviews corroboration to this theme. The turnover the company has experienced is quite astounding as a result. To counteract it, the CEO seems to just be bringing in people he knows from Concur. Lastly a layoff was done recently but kept really quiet. I’m glad to see a few reviews here call it out, because it was done with no transparency, and a lot of heavy-handed ness about keeping it quiet. The layoff would have happened even if this recession hadn’t occurred. The company has significantly underperformed (as near as I could tell, leadership never reported results unless it was good news) for the last two years or so. I assume the CEO and CFO decided to blame the coronavirus on why the company is performing poorly instead of their own mismanagement. Nice for them. Wonder if Francisco sees the truth. They will claim to empower women in leadership roles and gender pay, but in reality that only pertains to the women they hired. A year ago the senior leadership team was 50% female. They’re all gone now. They will claim the company has a great culture. Payscale was once voted as the best place to work in Seattle. It was in the top 5 for the last 4 -5 years or so. But for the most part the people who led that culture are all gone. Most by their own choice due to the new execs and what they’ve done they started. And the culture that is there now is a shadow of its former self. Its been made worse by the recent layoff. So if you think this company is going to be a fun place to work, think again. People were generally stressed out or just apathetic even before the office closed (and the layoff). I can’t imagine what it is like now. They will claim they value transparency. The recent layoff is a proof point. No public announcements, no specifics noted internally. Nothing. If you value trust in your leadership, look elsewhere. They claim to value compensation. But in reality, they underpay relative to the local labor market (claiming the intangibles such as culture and work-life balance make up the difference). That worked at one point but the culture is gone, and the work life balance is gone. Also good luck getting equity. You have to either be a senior engineer or director+ to get any equity, and when you do, its laughably small. I am not a disgruntled employee. I was part of the team that got the business to its peak. We worked incredibly hard to get to that point, and its shocking to see how fast the company has been run into the ground. If you choose to work for Payscale, just know that its in process of turning itself from a fun place to work where we honestly tried to change the world for the better into another passionless corporate enterprise that sells boring software like expense reporting. If you like that environment, go for it. If you don’t need to trust your execs (even a little bit), go for it. But just know that there are lots of other great companies to work for in the market that have better environments, and they’ll probably pay you better too.
