Square Employee Reviews about "growing pains"

Pros

You really feel like you're helping small business owners, coworkers are very smart and push you to be better, company is doing well and people are happy. Very nice office and great food.

Cons

Growing pains of mid-size company: inexperienced managers, lack of resources, lack of structure that sometimes leads to inefficiency. And I know this is dumb but the lunch reimbursement in the SF office is unnecessarily complicated.

Advice to Management

Invest in people development, especially for managers. Square has a very "figure it out on your own" culture, but it's important for managers to have resources so they can learn to support their teams.

Pros

+ Great Mission + Well meaning people + Lots of freedom +Competitive pay + No annual or semi-annual churn of merit bonus (see also cons on this)

Cons

+ Growing pains + Not family friendly benefits or hours + Lots of room to grow - if you are at mid-career or lower. More senior folks will struggle with upward movement + Lousy commuter benefits + Hard if you don't live in San Fran + HR is unclear about how to get promoted + Lack of merit bonus keeps people less motivated on ownership - people spend a crazy amount of energy trying to *not* be the decision... maker

Advice to Management

You must be more consistent in how you treat employees. If you are so passionate about serving the under-served, start with your employees. Be empathetic to their unique situations, provide a clearer path for promotion.

Pros

Vision of Economic Empowerment executed at all levels of the company, strong Diversity and Inclusion efforts (see 7/20/17 TechCrunch article), free food and drinks, great benefits--health, dental, visual; 401K matching; flex PTO

Cons

Still has some growing pains from startup to more mature company at 8 years old.

Pros

Amazing company to work for

Cons

Typical growing pains of a new office

Advice to Management

More Transparency

Pros

- 'People first' is a view that stems from upper management all the way down the chain. Square places a large emphasis on generous benefits, leave policies and even the daily perks you see around the office. - Amazing cause which binds the employee together - Composition of employee base is really unique with large teams of Data Science, Finance, Analytics -- offers an employee a multitude of options with... internal mobility - Huge emphasis on Transparency

Cons

- Experiencing growing pains and working hard to continue to scale all functions of the business - Pretty flat managerial structure which offers a lot of opportunity for employees to take leadership, but can sometimes leave question to who is the actual decision maker

Advice to Management

Continue to put people first, invest in systems to help us grow, and provide top performers to grow their careers.

Pros

Square has tons of great people: in engineering, branding, customer support: most parts of the organization, really. Furthermore, there is a culture of working together across organizational boundaries and a collaborative mindset.

Cons

The constant reorgs and uncertainty about career paths and expectations reflect growing pains to be sure, maybe also a cultural/deliberate practice of not getting set in their ways. But it can be hard to understand what you're supposed to do, how long until the next big change, and who is supposed to keep what running as management is thinking of loftier things.

Advice to Management

For the most part, keep up the good work. Continue to hire the best people you can find and give them the authority to do their jobs. Do think more about how people work together and whether there is power without accountability (especially for non-manager senior engineers).

Pros

big enough to be impactful, but still so much room to grow smart, driven employees cutting-edge products, and they're only getting better perks are great

Cons

Some growing pains as some teams expand to new cities, even new countries! But that's a part of every company. We'll figure it out

Advice to Management

make sure our marketing/messaging is consistent - our focus on catering to upmarket merchants doesn't correlate well with the 'mom & pop' model we've built for so long

Pros

- Lot's of learning opportunities. Self-learning and personal improvement is at the core of Square. Majority of the founding team didn't have background in fintech but self-taught. You can see that it's still encouraged very actively. - We work hard but we are extremely stress free. Culture is really open to failing fast and learning from experiences.

Cons

- While mostly over now, growing pains can still be seen in certain parts of the company - Trying to be David against Goliath (the industry we are trying to disrupt) means a lot of hard work

Advice to Management

Keep up the good work. Please make sure that we have the best talent we can get.