Not at all what they made themselves out to be - Senior Software Engineer Xero Employee Review

2.0
29 Jul 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Good WLB - Full remote - Team members are lovely

Cons

- Tech stack is outdated - "best practices" used at Xero are VERY outdated - dev pace is extremely slow - expect to spend a lot of time maintaining a lot of services that provide very little functionality and are heavily over engineered - expect to spend a substantial amount of time documenting what you did so you can prove that you did it in your performance review, rather than focusing on actual code - the quality of code for 'modernised' apps is painful - engineers spend more time discussing nitpicks and how to name a variable appropriately rather than shipping code - expect to have substantial back and forth conversations that seem to exist for the sake of existing instead of actually working on the product - simply getting to ship code is inordinately slow - the performance rating process is easily the worst i have seen in many decades of tech. do not bother working on things that won't contribute to your goals, you will not be rewarded for those activities. - they will gaslight you and say its not stack ranking. it is. - obsession with putting AI in every business process for the sake of putting it in, the company is suffering from the same homogenization that US 'big tech' is following. the culture here is no different from other big blue tech companies. and the pay is worse than a lot of them.

Explore other reviews about Xero

5.0
24 Apr 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great culture and solid benefits

Cons

Could be a bit chaotic at times

3.0
1 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The team is super smart and everyone knows their stuff well. If you see an opportunity, you can take it and do it. Flat structure, less authority means you can experiment and do as much as you want.

Cons

There's not much of an onboarding, so you have to figure things out. It can feel very sink or swim. Also, you have to work across many different time zones as well, because the team is global. Also, people have very short fuses if you don't pick things up quickly or not as smart as them.

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