My entire team suffering burnout and upper management couldn't care less - Senior Software Engineer Handshake Employee Review

2.0
Jul 16, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

* Smart and caring team mates, who tend to be drawn by the company's stated mission of democratizing access to opportunities * Day-to-day work is generally not overly micro-managed, but can depend on your manager * Flexible daily schedule and work remotely * Good pay

Cons

* Leadership decrees overly ambitious deadlines and refuses to let them slip, causing extreme employee burnout. * Rushing to get new features out instead of having time to create them properly, contributes to the overall shoddiness of the code base and the large number of incidents that On Call has to respond to * House of cards codebase that is only getting worse not better * Mission is taking a hit because leadership is so focused on trying to avoid late stage startup failure that they are frantically "throwing spaghetti at the wall" to see what sticks, including initiatives that conflict with the supposed mission of Handshake * Employees treated like numbers and zero empathy from C-suite.

Explore other reviews about Handshake

5.0
Jun 24, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Remote opportunities for different projects.

Cons

Projects often pause, and we wish they would last longer.

1.0
May 22, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Challenging, interesting position in the short term.

Cons

The company has implemented a new timer policy that has “active” and “inactive” time on the backend that makes up for the total time. We were getting paid by total time (as you should), but HAI has changed it to only pay contributors for the time marked “active.” Time is “active” when scrolling, typing, and clicking within the specific task tab. Time is “inactive” when none of the previous actions are happening; i.e., when reading the task without moving the mouse or pressing keys, researching in another tab, etc. It sounds like they have changed the rules to only pay for active time, which has caused huge pay discrepancies. The percentage of inactive time is usually way more than active time on these timers due to the amount of reading, visual analyzing, thinking, and research required for some tasks. This behavior is unacceptable because time that seems “inactive” is still important to the quality and completion of tasks. They keep throwing accusations like “time thieves” around to justify it. If you respect yourself, pack it up and go somewhere else. I know most people who work at these places are desperate for income, but that’s exactly what they’re hoping for. They’re hoping you will be desperate enough to be taken advantage of.

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