Pros
In-store payments business remains strong and is genuinely Tyro's core strength, though it's increasingly under-resourced relative to its revenue contribution. Some genuinely talented engineers and support staff remain — for now.
Cons
I was a long-term employee and watched the culture shift sharply for the worse over the last few years, particularly on the tech and product sides, where bullying from senior leadership became normalised. The company has just made roughly 31 people redundant (around 28 in technology, 3 in product), with internal messaging framing this as "completing the product portfolio" and redirecting spend toward sales staff to address merchant churn. In my view, the stated rationale doesn't match what many of us experienced — a disproportionate number of those let go had previously raised concerns about operational maturity of new features, with some lodging formal HR complaints. I'd encourage anyone reading this to draw their own conclusions about whether that's coincidence. Restructuring on the delivery side has been frequent enough that, in my opinion, it looks more like a way to manage how things are presented to the board than a genuine effort to fix structural issues. There's been very little real investment in resilience or stable systems — the on-prem to cloud migration has been underway since 2014 without resolution, and the technical and domain knowledge needed to finish it has been steadily lost through repeated redundancies and attrition. Tyro has shifted from an engineering-led culture to a product-led one. That's not inherently bad, but in practice it's meant a near-total absence of focus on non-functional requirements — stability, resilience, operational maturity — in favour of features that look good in sales decks. I rarely saw anyone in tech leadership with payments domain experience, despite some having finance backgrounds. There's also been a noticeable rise in stress, anxiety and burnout among staff — multiple colleagues have gone on stress leave or started medication, based on personal conversations. My honest view, for what it's worth: the company appears to be positioning for a sale as efficiently as possible, and I'd be very surprised if systems or staff are retained for long after any acquisition given the current state of the technology estate.
