Guidewire Employee Reviews about "work life balance"

Pros

It would take a lot to get me to work somewhere else. The environment, people and benefits are what keeps me here. Plenty of opportunities within the company for travel (or not, if you don't like travel). They really value work/life balance so you can work to live, not live to work.

Cons

Mandatory PTO at the end of the year

Pros

Guidewire is a good company to work for. Chances to work abroad, maintain healthy work life balance, prestigious clients and some of the best team members and colleagues.

Cons

The company is going thorugh the growth pain. Specially the professional services unit lost of disconnect with higher management. Appraisal and Promotion process is sporadic and is a comlete blackbox.

Advice to Management

Please value your employees and provide them opportunities to grow. Please talk to field consultants at lower designation and find out their perspectives and issues. Make them feel inclusive.

Pros

Guidewire has been trying to transition to the Cloud for the past few years now which means there are many opportunities and teams where you can work with marketable technologies and grow your career.

Cons

Things are no longer the same at Guidewire. Guidewire used to be a good company which supported flexibility and autonomy. This is why it was such a highly reviewed place here on Glassdoor and won accolades for being one of the best places to work for in the past. It used to have a pretty good work-life balance. However, new mandates are being rolled out right now which are going to change all of that. Before you had... the opportunity to work from home every Friday, which gave everyone a break from their commute. This is no longer going to be allowed starting early next year. Also, before you could work flexible hours and dial in to the stand ups from home. Now you have to attend the stand up in-person and be in the office by 9:30 am. Additionally, starting next year everyone will be *forced* to pair with each other. As others have mentioned, in this changing environment manager’s instincts are to micromanage their teams and they have been getting away with it too. I honestly feel really bad for those who are here on work Visas because they have too much to lose to speak up about these changes. They have also eliminated most of the Senior and above positions and converted them to new grad ones. If I were a new grad I would stay far far away from here. At the very maximum I would just use them to get another offer elsewhere.

Pros

Casual work environment. Travel over seas for training. Good work/life balance.

Cons

GSC work is not challenging or exciting. Hard to feel any sense of pride in the work being done. It is a rare to have to design any sort of algorithm to solve complex problems. Most of the work is dedicated to upgrades and other menial tasks.

Pros

* Moving towards Cloud * Latest Technologies * Good work life balance and compensation

Cons

* Top down management * Employees transferred to teams without proper discussion * HR bends towards management instead of analyzing real issue.

Advice to Management

Company direction and vision is good but not transparent

Pros

Work-life balance Stable environment Colleagues are collegial

Cons

Guidewire used to be a bottom up company. Developers were given freedom to drive projects. Now it's top down culture. Management holds most decision power - while not being hands-on enough to really understand what's going on. It's OK if you just want a cushy job and don't mind being told to implement suboptimal solutions. Not good if you are aspired to do the right thing. Technical caliber of engineering teams is... going down as more old timers quit.

Advice to Management

Quality of management in product development seems extremely uneven. In some areas poor management is driving people to quit.

Pros

While there is no perfect company, Guidewire is about as close as you are going to get. We run into challenges like every company does--some internal, some external. But when your entire organization, not just the executives, are rational and highly intelligent, it makes solving those problems a lot easier and faster. The long-term trajectory of Guidewire is amazingly strong and senior leadership, from the... person I report to all they way to our CEO, is truly exceptional. The group consists of quite possibly the most humble, rational group of leaders that could be collected. This is a unique place to work.

Cons

It's tough to articulate cons that are unique to Guidewire. For example, if you are in a role at Guidewire that requires heavy travel, does that force you to constantly plan and adjust to achieve work-life balance? Of course--but that's true of any company.

Advice to Management

Continue to stay the course on our company values, regardless of our growth and the investment community expectations that expand every year. I don't pretend that this will be easy---but it's worth it.

Pros

-Management is great -Good work culture -Excellent work/life balance -Good benefits/compensation -Down-to-earth CEO

Cons

-Culture is great, but could be a little more social

Advice to Management

Need to recruit more young talent for diversity and culture