Betterment Reviews

Pros

Unlimited PTO, Full Benefits, Work From Home Opportunities, Friendly co workers, Amazing in office environment, and so many incentives

Cons

The company is growing constantly, so many changes are happening where you can not get too comfortable doing you job one way before it changes. Other Than That an amazing company to work for

Pros

Interesting problems to solve High trust culture Colleagues that are both really smart and really good at teaching each other People actually use pto Decent opportunities to connect even as a remote employee Great engineering culture - people pair program often, give thorough and non judgmental PR reviews, culture of do it right rather than do it the quickest (I.e. good test coverage) Overall very deliberate choices re: hiring, engineering designs, product planning

Cons

As a remote employee in engineering, it’s easy to be siloed from other teams unless you make an effort

Pros

Everyone is very nice and generally helpful. Lots of smart people around. I was impressed with HR and IT in particular. They have a program to get customer service folks into engineering roles which is very cool, I loved meeting and working with some of those engineers.

Cons

Engineering is a bit of a mess, particularly if you have significant experience elsewhere. Many of the best engineers have left recently. My team saw 80% turnover in 6 months. But it varies widely; front-end folks seem to be in a good spot and insulated from a lot of backend hairiness thanks to good platform and sre teams. Crypto fans are taking over and there is an internal struggle between folks excited about that and folks worried it will tarnish Betterments brand as the responsible choice compared to competitors. The business is in a rough spot; hard to make money with current products, biggest competitor acquired in down round. They are remote friendly, but not remote first. Be wary of being remote on a team that mostly lives near the office.

Pros

Competitive salary to start. Management means well but does not have much influence on decisions. "Unlimited" PTO. Good insurance. They are understanding about needing off for appointments, mental health days, etc.

Cons

Far too few employees in nearly all departments doing far too much work. Slow to backfill. Obsessed with the bottom line since losing the founder and CEO, who had a genuine care for the company and the employees. A reluctance to backfill positions- and it is a major issue as tenured employees are leaving in droves due to the changes in the company. Outsourcing work that should be internal. Not supporting career growth with internal hires, and instead, taking on folks with no experience with our product. They ask CX to fill many holes in the company (to save money) without room for advancement. No transparency. Huge announcements blind-sighting even management with no plan for implementation shared. No existing "office culture" or company identity. Opportunities for raises only come once a year and in small increments that barely cover inflation, in spite of good performance. Many co-workers feel like violin players on the titanic and we look toward offering products that go against the company's founding ethos without the manpower needed to make it happen.

Pros

- Amazing culture - Great coworkers, you won't find any toxic people here or hear of any coworker horror stories - WLB is pretty good. Didn't have to work weekends or long hours. Can take PTO or light PTO (e.g. need to take afternoon off for something) without any issues - Engineering titles seem well balanced (no title inflation), e.g. senior engineers are actually senior engineers and not people with, say 2 years experience - People generally are competent at their jobs - Clear and defined career ladder. Promos happen anywhere from every 1-3 years, depending on level - Good DEI in management/senior management

Cons

- Compensation. The company is correct when they say salary is competitive. However, because it is a private company, equity is worthless until IPO. If you join here, you'll be maybe somewhat happy with your base salary and small bonus but your peers at big tech companies will be coasting with their liquid stock options worth tens or hundred thousands per year. - Future: company is pushing towards IPO but will it really happen? Wealthfront was recently acquired for less than 2B. Robo advising and 401k's is a solid business I guess but doesn't feel like much room for growth. If they expand to becoming a brokerage (allow buying of stocks/crypto etc) people will complain about the company moving away from their core values (robo advising) - Company sells 401k services to other businesses as a core product but doesn't offer a 401k match until after 2 years of working here. Even then, this was started only this year, and it's only a 2% match - 3 senior engineering directors left in the past 2 months. (There were only 4 to begin with). Also have heard stories of previous senior management leaving (without offers) citing reasons "burnout due to hiring". Red flag? Advice for engineers looking to work here: At the moment, try for actual big tech companies first. Your liquid stock options will heavily thank you. Betterment is a great company to work for culture wise (as I mentioned) but unfortunately the total comp is not very competitive. For example, if you have 10 yoe, that may land you a senior role here with ~185k total liquid comp but 350k+ elsewhere at public, big tech companies

Pros

* Admirable company values that employees actually know and talk about regularly w.r.t. the Product and decision making * The board brought in new management to breathe life into the product (new CEO, CMO, VPE, etc) * Brand recognition * Solid SRE team that builds effective infrastructure tooling * You can advance your title and responsibilities quickly * Genuinely good people work at Betterment, and there are many opportunities to engage in the organization beyond your "day job"

Cons

* Consistently chased the market with Product decisions, a.k.a "shiny-object" syndrome * Engineering underwent ever more frequent "re-orgs" to organize teams around new Product priorities * Structural churn induced employee turnover, which led to inexperienced folks in decision making positions * Engineering had few senior members with recent or significant outside experience * Built minimum viable features and then rarely iterated on them after launch, leaving them to wither on the vine * Revenue growth was low, so equity upside is also low compared to other fintechs * The Betterment Core Portfolio consistently performed worse than competitors portfolios and the S&P * No 401(k) matching