What is the hiring process like at Xero?

- Really interesting product and the opportunity to have a positive impact on small businesses. - Generally great people at the IC level - Remuneration is ok.

Management, particularly middle management is toxic. Since the influx of North American senior management over the last 2 years the culture of the company has completely changed and employees are pretty much treated like cattle. Annual salary increases for supposedly good performance of < 2% are common. Nepotism is rife amongst the new North American management who bring in their buddy's, earning probably double what their southern hemisphere equivalent's are earning and do sfa. There are a lot of people struggling with stress and mental health issues and all management and PX will do is point you to EAP and wellbeing resources rather than address the structural problems causing people to feel this way. Forum's where people vent and highlight things that the company is doing poorly are shut down with Internal Platform Etiquette guides rather than trying to understand the reasoning behind spicy messages where they might actually learn what's really going on at the company. The #human value was dropped in favour of #makeithuman which came at the same time as introducing a new performance framework. The message is clear that you are only worth something to the company if you are performing. There is a veneer of compassion and valuing people as human beings but scratch the surface and you'll find Xero does nothing more than meet their bare minimum legal obligations.

- Good WLB - Full remote - Team members are lovely

- Tech stack is outdated - "best practices" used at Xero are VERY outdated - dev pace is extremely slow - expect to spend a lot of time maintaining a lot of services that provide very little functionality and are heavily over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.

• Talented and supportive colleagues • Hybrid and remote work flexibility • Modern, well-equipped offices • Free drinks and decent hardware • Shares (though value has declined in recent years)

Actions speak louder than words — and Xero’s actions have spoken volumes over the years. • Foundational systems have been under strain since at least 2019, with shifting priorities and constant pivots on product direction. • The company attempted to build a sole trader product over seven times — each attempt failed to deliver real customer value. • During COVID, leadership promised job security. Employees went above and beyond working remotely, but received little in return. • Stock price rises, hiring exploded under the guise of “growth” while management stayed largely silent and disconnected. Paying taxes on employee shares were stopped. • 2022 brought another failed sole trader product launch, millions of dollars lost, more blame-shifting from the board, early departing 'pre-Reset' staff silenced with NDAs. • The following year, ~10% of loyal, long-serving employees were laid off — many of them women — and a new CEO brought in. • That same year a $700k prize pool was announced to attract new customers — and the board gave itself a significant pay rise. • The next year saw the same core tech problems persist. Production was frozen after multiple incidents, the executive team was replaced and the new CEO took a large bonus. Company values changed to be less human-centric. • By 2025, new executives were appointed, AI used to 'recover' the 10% cut in staff. Pursues yet another acquisition, CEO salary increase followed by a symbolic shareholder strike, CEO tells accountants that in-product AI is not intended to replace their jobs. • Newly recruited C-level now located exclusively in the US, CEO tells investors revenue will double next year, share price halves over the following six months, most staff still given pay rises less than inflation, PIPs for any 'underperformance'. • 2026 brings a further rapidly declining stock price with more layoffs as a result, claims around "accessing a global talent pool" are used to justify the deep cuts for whoever remains. Deeper Issues • Teams are stuck in endless cycles of pivoting, rarely shipping anything meaningful. • Internal technical debt is ignored. The platform continues to age while flashy new features take priority. • Testing and QA are deprioritised, which limits growth and undermines product quality. • Management turnover is so high that performance reviews and growth plans are regularly discarded. • Many in leadership lack understanding of how the product works, how teams operate, or what customers need. • Stack ranking and performance management create a culture of fear, not development. • Salaries are inconsistent, hiring processes are unstructured, and internal promotion often depends more on office politics than merit. • Career paths are vague, and high performers are often overworked and overlooked. • Core values like #ownership and #human felt like branding exercises rather than real commitments. • Employees are made to feel like they are the problem while leadership deflects accountability.

Smooth interview process for all rounds

Pay rise is way below the market.

Lovely offices, many of the people are great.

Slow moving. Red tape everywhere. Absolutely everything is the same priority which means nothing is a priority, they pretend it’s working with new company OKRs, but they’re all so conflicting you need to elevate things up to get decisions (this is AFTER the reset). They have also introduced a new performance rating process (sounds great in theory), however, they’re unfairly assessing people, as managers we’re being forced by our GMs to put people into an “under performing” (a.k.a “Below Expected”) category even if the person is NOT under performing, they’re expecting people to resign from Xero when put into this category, so obviously there is a hidden agenda to remove more people from the company. They lie CONSTANTLY and gaslight people’s questions, and as a manager hearing these lies be told it’s hard. Individuals can no longer raise concerns about people above them. There’s also absolutely NO career progression here, especially for managers, they have released a career framework, but they pretty much said it’s a deadend for certain roles in tech.

Smart and interesting people to work with. That's what kept me here so long. The work itself is great too. Still a leading NZ tech company. Great WLB.

Pay. Yes Xero is unable to compete with many companies that poach employees (especially a problem since remote work started). However I want to specifically highlight unfair pay gaps **Within Xero**. 4 years ago I observed some senior (and lead) engineers earning less than mid-level engineers. I.e. some people were earning more than others 1-2 levels above them. Makes no sense! I asked my manager at the time about this, and was told the company struggled to increase the pay of existing employees. Especially those on older/larger teams. I naively thought this problem would resolve itself over time, especially with the increased focus on standardisation and new processes around employee retention. Unfortunately, it is still very much a problem. Not just between mid/senior/lead engs, but new grads now earn more than some associate/mid level engs (same 1-2 IC level difference). The root cause seems to be employees accepting minor bumps in pay or even promotions without a pay bump (i.e. title change only), while new hire offers have increased. Personally when I was promoted from mid to senior, management tried to gaslight me into accepting a salary below the senior minimum, by talking about the recent layoffs at the time. When the entire point of the layoffs was to increase retention budget.

Smart and interesting people to work with. That's what kept me here so long. The work itself is great too. Still a leading NZ tech company. Great WLB.

Pay. Yes Xero is unable to compete with many companies that poach employees (especially a problem since remote work started). However I want to specifically highlight unfair pay gaps **Within Xero**. 4 years ago I observed some senior (and lead) engineers earning less than mid-level engineers. I.e. some people were earning more than others 1-2 levels above them. Makes no sense! I asked my manager at the time about this, and was told the company struggled to increase the pay of existing employees. Especially those on older/larger teams. I naively thought this problem would resolve itself over time, especially with the increased focus on standardisation and new processes around employee retention. Unfortunately, it is still very much a problem. Not just between mid/senior/lead engs, but new grads now earn more than some associate/mid level engs (same 1-2 IC level difference). The root cause seems to be employees accepting minor bumps in pay or even promotions without a pay bump (i.e. title change only), while new hire offers have increased. Personally when I was promoted from mid to senior, management tried to gaslight me into accepting a salary below the senior minimum, by talking about the recent layoffs at the time. When the entire point of the layoffs was to increase retention budget.

Good, thorough onboarding and induction. Value driven organisation.

I have no cons for Xero

Worked with really smart and capable engineers Interesting technical problems

Execs think because some worked for the likes of Google, they know everything Sukhinder once said during company wide meeting that being a CEO is hard and if anyone would like to swap places with her, they’re welcome to. Sure, it must also be very hard to take home USD15,000,000 as a rem package whilst others barely get a 2% pay rise during high inflation. Increasing customers monthly subscriptions and getting rid of people via a sham performance review process that’s constantly changing every couple of months. Your time will be busy making sure you’re ticking the right boxes rather than doing actual work that would make a difference and impact not only to the company but to customers. Could barely write code and release due to politics and what should be a a day or twos work can turned into weeks and months of documentation to justify why x is going to take x long. Because no one trust anyone to do their job and micromanaging is rife building their own fiefdom. As an engineer, be prepared to wear many hats, from BA, PO, delivery, testing, documentations and all administration that coding would be like 15% and the rest is dealing with management politics. If you want to progress with your career, then learn to stroke the right ego and become a yes sir and ma’am because if you think hard work and capabilities will get you there, you’re dreaming. There is lacking leadership at most levels. The key thing here is how to get share price up so the execs can get their bonuses and go. Combining CPO and CTO, well… just look at the incident page and see how the system is going. But hey, they used to work for Google. Thanks to the sham performance reviews, the only way to survive is to stab each others back because every year, you’ll be competing with your colleagues to keep your job as someone will always get the boot. I no longer volunteer as tribute.

- Good benefits like Xtra leave, free lunch every Thursday, parental leave - Talented and hardworking people

- Post layoffs, there's more pressure and stress (everyone feels it), working longer hours - Still way too many middle managers, indecision and process - Low pay - Silicon Valley hustle culture