A couple of years ago this company was great and I would've happily given 5 stars. However, in the recent years we've seen a lot of attrition in the company and acquisition of employees from other companies into executive positions and this seems to correlate to a crumbling culture and move away from employee-centric decision making. Paylocity claims to be transparent and adaptable to feedback, but so far this year we've been dragged along to find out about the changes in this upcoming fiscal year and the changes come across as tone deaf as they are seemingly nonresponsive to feedback.
We were told we would know about compensation one week only to wait and be told it'd be the week after that and so on, until just this week, already into FY23, we were informed that we would be getting less PTO days and they would all be changed to accruals instead of allotting sick and float time up front. The previous year, we had been given 2 additional float holidays. This year, they took those additional days away. Additionally, we are now obligated to pay back sick time if we leave the company with a negative balance, even though we "are allowed 40 negative hours". Why not just give us the 40 upfront like before?
They make a big deal about absorbing insurance costs but the insurance options are far from remarkable. I had vision insurance my first year and ended up paying twice as much out of pocket than I would've if I had not used it. The only remarkable thing about this is they had been putting $700/yr into your HSA if you opt into one, which is what I've been relying on to pay my medical bills. Given the upcoming changes, I wouldn't rely on that benefit being there much longer.
Paylocity has recently geared itself towards long term incentives by giving more employees RSUs. They allocate by dollar amount instead of stock units, which was terrible because last year we were given them when the stocks were high, then by the time they will be vested the share prices will be little more than half in value than what they were purchased at. RSUs vest over a 4 year period. The only change this FY is they will be accessible quarterly instead of yearly, which isn't particularly useful unless you're looking to do short term sales or leave soon. They also include this in the calculation for the compensation package, which makes no sense because you're only getting 1/4th of it each year, and anything that isn't vested is reabsorbed by the company. I'm not feeling very incentivised by this pseudo-bonus.
Finally, after all employees made sacrifices during the pandemic by giving up 401K matching, bonuses, and annual increases (typically 3%/yr), we find out just yesterday from our CEOs that the only pay increase we will be getting is "just north of 5%". Mind you, there were no increases during the pandemic due to "uncertainty", and inflation was 7% and 8.5% for the following years. This news comes after listening to our executives brag for months about how well the company is doing, how we are amazingly unaffected by recessions, and the company is still hiring and not planning on laying anyone off, and it's all thanks to us! Well, we're not feeling the appreciation. This is certainly not the competitive pay that Paylocity claims to be touting. I've been approached frequently by other companies and their offers are looking very lucrative at this point in time.
The company also has a fast and cheap approach to development, so most of our code looks like half-baked spaghetti and is a nightmare to maintain and near impossible to scale. There has been talk about managing tech debt but it leaves much to be seen so far. Instead, focus is on making as many features as possible in as little time available. We don't even complete a full feature before starting new ones! This is probably the worst thing about being a developer at this company. We want to scale up to handle massive clients, but we don't want to spend the time or money improving our architecture to improve it!
The nail in the coffin is the workplace culture. It used to be wonderful, and I'm not sure how and when it changed. Despite touting diversity and inclusion, Paylocity's approach to fostering a diverse and inclusive environment is passive at best. This became most evident with the recent benefit post supporting reproductive healthcare. I witnessed a handful of coworkers post their opinions on the matter, and as an addendum to those posts, they felt it was also appropriate to trivialize the need for healthcare of individuals, demonize the individuals in need of said healthcare, express disdain towards the company for supporting said healthcare, and even throw in a couple of discriminatory remarks. Weeks later, those posts are still there with the objectively offensive blurbs because apparently, in order to be a respectful culture, we have to allow hateful discourse that will effectively demoralize employees on our work media because they're someone's opinions.
Lastly, they redid the career architecture to allegedly match market. It does not. All that was effectively done is more padding was added to the end of the software engineer career track by giving additional principal engineer roles and dissolving dev lead. Nothing was given between SE and SSE, leaving a giant crevice to jump for non veteran developers. Good luck ever seeing any of the new positions added, because this architecture favors engineers towards the end of their career with no thought given to those at the beginning or middle.
