Toast Inc reviews

3.8

69% would recommend to a friend

(1,661 total reviews)
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Aman Narang

77% approve of CEO

65% positive business outlook

Toast Inc has an employee rating of 3.8 out of 5 stars, based on 1,661 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
May 15, 2020

Disappointed

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The office is accessible, there's some really great talent around. A relatively diverse place to be.

Cons

After being here for 2.5 years, things have gotten seemingly bleak. Our layoff wasn't handled very well. I'm now 1 person of what used to be a 4-person team. Recently, myself and a few others received a negative pay change and title change, and worked for two weeks without even knowing these changes were made to our pay. I lost my pay structure and bonus, and nobody told me. Worse, the way I found out was by receiving a random systems alert that showed I had a whole new title/pay I never knew of. This is what is received when you work at Toast for 2.5+ years. It's continuing to be clear that the Customer Success organization is the least cared about. I'm tired of being lied to, the "culture benefits" of Toast are only reaped when you work on the "upper floors". Quite literally, Toast maintains physical barriers of the elite vs. "the bottom" in the offices. The CS organization is kept in a space that is outdated and a total mess. The other departments, however, are all kept in beautifully updated spaces, with views of the city and plenty of space. With no career development, no opportunity for a raise, and such a lack of care for the employee base, my only professional motivation is seeking employment elsewhere.

1.0
Apr 3, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Perks of a startup: Free food and beer. Poker nights. Company outings. Etc. Nice open offices with good lighting. Plenty of quiet rooms as well. Upper management actively seeks feedback about the company and tries to communicate on a regular basis.

Cons

The engineering team is always under the gun with tight deadlines. The reason for this is that the code base for the product has grown piecemeal, and progress towards refactoring into manageable components has stalled over and over. Code releases are a headache as every team ends up pushing new features into the same code base at the same time to make the cutoff for checkins, only for conflicts to arise as commits conflict. There's a strange lack of autonomy when it comes to developing features - every project has to be signed off by an architect or team lead, who happen to be the original developers of the product. Management may solicit feedback, but won't act on suggestions for the engineering team. Upper management seems at a lost how to deal with the lack of productivity within the group. If you're not committed to working nights and weekends, expect your review to reflex you may not be a "culture" fit.

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Toast Inc Response
8y
Thank you for your input. Part of our challenge is exactly what you describe, and we are doing several things to improve the situation. With significant growth in our customer base and scale, the only 5 year old product is being stressed in ways that could not have been anticipated just a few years ago. That is why we launched the V2020 project over a year ago to address refactoring and completing our move to a micro-services architecture which will allow more autonomous and continuous deployments. We increased the team size on that project in January. At the same time we have been addressing the needs of new customers, new features, reducing the defect count and improving product performance. During the last year we have hired a significant number of awesome & talented teammates who are helping drive us towards a better architecture, code base and automated test environment while keeping customers delighted with our product. Hugh
3.0
Jan 27, 2023

Wants to be one of the big guys but still has start-up mentality

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Unlimited Time Off - Decent benefits (though not completely on par with industry) - Great corporate culture (declining though)

Cons

When I first started at Toast, I bragged to people about how fantastic the corporate culture was. To some extent that's still true, but now it seems that culture is declining. We used to have monthly "one team" meetings and they used to allow anonymous questions and comments. Now the meetings are quarterly, which is fine, but they eliminated the anonymous feature for questions. This has led to the questions/comments mostly just being cheerleading the SLT. It has eliminated honest feedback from people who may not feel comfortable sharing ideas without the safety of anonymity. I know they taut that there are many avenues and that there is never any repurcussions, but we all know that even with the best of intentions, there are ALWAYS repurcussions even if it's just subconscious bias. From the top down there is a SIGNIFICANT lack of organization in terms of esnuring that we truly are One Team. Many projects end up with people working in silos unaware that others are working on the exact same issues. Toast continues to go after expansion opportunities without having current processes buttoned down and running smoothly. Unless you are presenting some new, shiny geegaw that we can sell our customers or otherwise monetize, if you try to raise an issue you get told to be "more commercial". And heaven forbid you try to raise concerns with anyone's new pet project!

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Toast Inc Response
3y
My name is Meg and I recently joined Toast as the VP of Internal Communications & Engagement. Diversity of thought is top of mind for leaders at Toast, so thank you for sharing your perspective. In looking into the change you’re referencing about all hands in particular, Toast pivoted away from anonymous questions to create space for constructive questions with transparency in mind. It also enables leadership to answer any follow-up questions and build connections with employees after the event. We view feedback from employees as a gift, and we will continue to explore avenues for open conversation, like our leadership coffee chats, annual confidential employee survey, and and AllVoices, a platform where you may share feedback anonymously. If you’re comfortable, please feel free to reach out to me directly for a meet & greet so I can hear more about what’s on your mind. Thanks for your time!
Viewing 16 - 18 of 1,661 Reviews

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