Saddens me to write such a negative review for a company I once adored.
Pros
ToD was a great place to start my career, and am very glad to have experienced all that the ToD community had to offer in-person (pre-COVID). The community in the office was, at times, incredible. A ton of smart people, and you can cultivate your own community. I won't use a blanket term and say that the people are all great, but there is a good opportunity to find people you'll love to work with. Find your people and you will enjoy your time here. ToD has some really great customers and an outstanding reputation. I was proud to work at ToD and proud of the work I got to do. Very positive experience during first 2 years of my time at ToD. Last 1.5 years was painful - not all at once, but slowly. My heart broke slowly as I was bounced between managers and given little to no guidance or feedback.
Cons
ToD leverages its "great place to work culture" to justify low salaries and sub-par benefits. Compensation is below industry standard. No RRSP contribution/401k equivalent, and instead there is a cult of "owners". To become part of the ESOP program, I had to a) wait 2 years and b) write a letter of justification to the CEO. Shares/options are table stakes and if you chose to stick with the ESOP program, find a better way. If you are regarded as a superstar within ToD, you're golden and all opportunities will be handed to you. To achieve superstar status, you will need to do your job + someone else's and be a cultural champion. If you dare stick to your job description, you will be overlooked and outshined. Sometimes just doing your job well is enough, but not at ToD. You need to overachieve and make sacrifices to even be noticed. Long hours and you're expected to bend over backwards. Senior resources take the brunt out resourcing challenges and, as a result, are burnt out. I feel for them all. They support so many younger, more junior resources simply because if they didn't, the business would crumble. The staffing pyramid (until recently) has been very bottom heavy. I have seen green resources take on multi-million dollar projects with only 1-2 hours of oversight from a senior resource. This is not so much a criticism of the people, but more a cause for concern for the senior resources who are asked to do so much, including mentor and course correct for junior folks. When I joined ToD, the values had just been re-jigged to reflect the ToD of the time; after 3 years, these had not changed despite immense change and growth across the organization. I believe that ToD had the best of intentions of seeing these values realized from top to bottom and bottom to top, but there were some table-stakes type items that fell through the cracks (i.e. wellness / mental health days or mental health benefits of any kind). In lieu of these types of benefits, I often found management quashing concerns of today with visions of the future, many of which were either obviously unrealistic (i.e a ToD campus?) or only applied to small subset of Tractionites (due to location or eligibility).
