A terrible and toxic place to work - stay away! - Anonymous employee Pantheon Systems Employee Review

1.0
Aug 28, 2023
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Most people are genuinely kind and it's enjoyable to work with fellow ICs.

Cons

First and foremost, this is not a safe place to work if you are a minority or care about DEI. Instead of hiring a full-time DEI Director, they hired someone whose job was 25% DEI and 75% Executive Assistant to a member of the C-Suite. How is that person supposed to uplift people of color at work when that is not their full-time job? Minorities are put into ERGs and told that meeting attendance and volunteering is the most important thing they can do. While this is great in theory, the real issue is the company systematically disempowers and discourages people of color from moving up within the org. With the exception of a few people, most people in leadership positions are white. Furthermore, they continue to lay off several people of color, queer, and other minority individuals in each of the three RIFs that happened over the course of six months. At least on the sales side, there was never a rhyme or reason why the people who were let go were chosen. Most of these people were meeting or exceeding their number. In the last RIF, every single person of color on the sales team was let go with the exception of one or two people. The people who made the layoff decisions do not understand nor care about diversity because they are not incentivized to do so. Which leads me into my next major concern. This company touts themselves as a company who cares deeply and profoundly about the impact they make on the world. When you first visit Pantheon's website and look at the websites they are proud to promote you are bombarded with liberal and left-leaning organizations. They act as if they give a damn about morals, but continue to double down on hosting hate groups because of "censorship" and the "open web". They would rather lose trusted customers and millions of dollars than stop hosting a hate group. They further exacerbated an unsafe work environment for minorities by not taking employees' concerns seriously and continuing to host some of the most egregious hate groups on the internet. The Pantheon product is too good - it is helping hate organizations scale at an alarming rate. They truly believed that this event would just blow over with time. They clearly do not understand their customers nor the way business is done in the WordPress and Drupal communities. They expected ICs to pick up the pieces with angry customers for months on end after the news broke. We were told to escalate it to our supervisors or the founders, but our customers wanted to hear from the people they knew and trusted, not another talking head regurgitating the same statement you can find with a quick Google search. The culture of toxicity only amplified over the time that I worked there. Every RIF brought down morale and it would be wild to think that there are not more RIFs coming for the folks still there. Every day over the past six months I worked at Pantheon I was told implicitly and explicitly that another RIF was coming and I was at risk. This further fostered an environment of fear, uncertainty, and doubt that made working here an anxiety-induced nightmare. Anytime I expressed this anxiety, I was told to work as hard as I could to meet my sales quota. Again, in reality, it didn't matter if you met quota or not - there was no rhyme or reason as to why people were laid off which is confusing for people who are still there that don't meet quota consistently that were kept over people who do. Furthermore, there is zero room for growth at Pantheon. There are no leadership programs for ICs, no mentorship, and very few levels (if any) of which you can climb to advance to a higher position. The shining stars on every sales team are working 60-70+ hours a week and have zero work boundaries (online at 4 AM always answering inbound leads). There is no work-life balance at Pantheon if you want to be what they consider "successful'. There is no positioning yourself to transition to another team if you feel your skillset could be better suited elsewhere. The rationale is usually there is no budget to transition folks but the company has zero problem blowing tons of money at events. Which leads me to ask, how does this business stay profitable? They paid for a massive sales kickoff in San Francisco (hotels, airfare, multiple dinners and parties) and then fired half of those people a month later. Same thing with DrupalCon - a massive expense to then cut almost 100 people a month and a half later. Are any members of the C-Suite taking a pay cut as they continue to blow tons of money and then lay people off in droves? Probably not, considering the VP of Sales has gone on record to tell their direct reports that "if they're not spending at least a million dollars on potential clients a year they're doing their job wrong". Please, do not join this company. It is not worth sacrificing your mental and physical health to try and reach unrealistic goals for a company that pretends to care about you but never has and never will. Again, the goals are unrealistic and you won't be successful here with the extremely toxic environment that has been festering for well over a year now.

Explore other reviews about Pantheon Systems

5.0
Oct 12, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Lots of great people, both new and tenured. New leadership seems generally great. Strong customer base that loves the product. The new CEO is setting a high bar and shows real belief in both the business and the individuals at the company. It's an exciting time to see the opportunity and have a leader that is giving the resources the make a leap forward.

Cons

There are areas of the organization that are still stabilizing after so many leadership changes over the past year. It seems the new leadership is capable, but it will take time for the culture and trust to follow. A lot of technical debt exists, but thankfully there are lots of engineers that understand how to eliminate now. They need a chance to make this happen though.

2
1.0
May 25, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Some nice people, and the product has a good reputation in the industry

Cons

Where to start... Once again, a new leadership team has replaced the old set of managers with new ones, and I'm surprised they found an even worse set of sycophantic, incurious performers. The people team are already posting fake reviews on Glassdoor again. Product has no clue what they are doing or why the competition is passing us. Marketing sends us AI slop and expects us to use it. I'm hoping we get sold to a company that puts real leaders in place instead of the constant stream of amateurs who know nothing about Saas.

4
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