Overworked, Underpaid - Anonymous employee Personio Employee Review

1.0
May 29, 2024
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Salary is good on paper - Stock options look nice - WFH 100% of the time

Cons

- The pay looks good on paper but Personio will do everything to not promote people, I saw many engineers denied promotions that they deserved for a long time. - They use nonsense barriers for promotion to hold back well-deserved promotions. - The development environment and tooling are completely broken. - There is no engineering leadership at this company. - Company is run by product/business people with no engineering voice, so decisions are made haphazardly and engineering teams are left running to catch up. - Company has been replaced at nearly every level by ex-Facebook employees, importing an American-style work culture. - Claim to want to redesign the product, only to layoff all of the designers who have designed the new version of the product - Overtime is expected. Claim to be a "fast-paced start-up" as an excuse. - Cross-team alignment/collaboration is non-existent, everyone works in complete silos, demands come from other teams out of nowhere. Teams building the same services side-by-side, or teams building out functionality that nobody asked for. - The performance review process is a complicated mess, an Excel sheet where you are expected to fight for your job and argue for everything you've done. - Many employees have admitted to working on this Excel sheet after hours and on weekends - Unnecessary redundancies have cut understaffed teams even further than they already were. Personio wanted to pretend to be Facebook and do layoffs like all the other FAANGS and export Jobs to the US & Poland. - People were measured by story points, which were completely made up and not representative of actual work. - People who had no 1-1 with their managers only to be made redundant out of nowhere - Engineers were forced to move onto new teams and then made redundant because they didn't get up to speed quickly enough. Another review stated this and it rings true; They think they're a FAANG but they pay like Personio.

Explore other reviews about Personio

5.0
Oct 14, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

My coworkers are wonderful, I feel energized coming to work everyday

Cons

The company has had a lot of churn at Director+ levels, not a clear vision across the company

1.0
Oct 30, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Smart collaborative colleagues at the lower IC levels.

Cons

Personio is a dying company. The over-complexity of the company's technical systems is comical. Every attempt to simplify seems to lead to more complexity as things get half migrated and left to rot. Engineering leadership seems clueless and unable to present a clear plan-of-action to get things on track. Principal engineers force engineering time to be spent on silly projects that don't move the needle long-term. There is an overall aversion to taking the time to learn deeply about systems being used. Personio feels like a combination of all of the negatives of both a startup and a mature tech company, with none of the positives. The tech is half assed and duct taped together, but still somehow everything moves at a glacial pace. There is a mass shared delusion at the company that an IPO is in reach. No investor is going to buy this company's junk shares on the open market.

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