Paytronix Reviews

You’ve most likely arrived at this review, of this position, at this company, because you are a prospective TC candidate looking to join the Client Services (CS) department of Paytronix. Let’s be very clear from the beginning: the PX CS department is great for getting your first 18 months in the professional workplace on paper, but that’s about it. You’ll emerge from the other end having minimized your acquisition of new marketable skills, and having maximized your levels of professional and personal stress. If you remember nothing else of this review: when confronted with the 20-25% (not a typo) yearly employee churn rate of the CS department caused by the culture I am about to explain, the CEO of the company suggested that this was within their yearly projections for CS churn, and therefore no serious cultural revisions were required. Let’s break it down: TC Role coming out of college New College Grads are the raw resources that feed the machine. A lot of other reviews (please go read them) covered this in detail, just know that the details are true. You will be on call roughly 2-3 weeks of the year, responsible for tier 2 24/7 support of the Paytronix platform, and you will be compensated one vacation day per week. You will be encouraged (but not forced) to work more than 40 hours a week, since your client load will balloon within your first few months due to the astronomical churn rate of good TCs. On my way out, new TCs with 6 months or less of experience were expected to handle 10-15 enterprise clients on minimal training and thin understanding of the product. Which brings us to the next section: The Product As soon as 5 years ago, Paytronix was an industry leader because of its rock solid integrations to legacy POS (point of sale) systems including Micros Aloha and Positouch. Well, guess who in the restaurant industry still cares about rock solid integrations to legacy POS systems in 2020? The landscape of restaurant tech has changed drastically as restaurant chains begin to embrace big data and digital experiences. Paytronix was slow to move in this arena, and the product you support reveals this fact. You will be hired as the primary product consultant for your client load, and you will be expected to provide highly specialized guidance on waning legacy systems (POS, physical gift cards etc) as well as Paytronix’s modern tech (mobile apps, API integrations). This story alone isn’t necessarily an issue, and in fact is characteristic of most modern tech companies. Where Paytronix lacks is in their execution. All roads lead to the TC getting screwed. Products are released broken, buggy, and unsupported, and you will be expected to provide frontline support against “angry” clients to prevent them from churning. The product team is some of the hardest working at the PX, and truly do make a great attempt at listening to the client base, but in the end they are hamstrung by the fact that all major product decisions are made by the founder and CEO. Which brings us to the final section: The Culture Paytronix has a pervasive and disappointing top-down culture, it was the reason I left the company, and it is the reason why you shouldn’t join. Managers in CS exist only to fulfill the will of the highest leadership, which is to maximize client load while minimizing costs. There is no forward thinking in terms of planning for growth, CS is a giant Rube Goldberg machine that gets complicated stages added to it every day. The CEO maintains an iron grip on nearly all decisions made in the company, but especially the ones centered around product and engineering. Out-of-the-box thinking will be punished if it doesn’t fall in line with leadership vision. In Conclusion Having worked there for the better part of a decade, I was able to watch this sad story unfold. At a time, I was the biggest champion of Paytronix as both an employee and a fan of the product. This unfortunately faded as attention was shifted away from the people of Paytronix, and into the maximization of profit. Around 2 years ago, Paytronix was acquired by an investment firm Great Hill Partners. Great Hill Partners is the same firm that gutted the beloved Deadspin in its quest for profit. I make no solid claims that these two are connected, but the coincidence in the decline of the culture is uncanny. After your honeymoon period, working for Paytronix will be an exercise in staying afloat while you find your next opportunity. This review suggests not to try it in the first place.

While 4 weeks vacation is good for traditional companies, for a startup like Paytronix, they should match the industry and competitors and offer unlimited vacation. The fact that you need to take a vacation day when you are sick is a very bad policy. Many of my coworkers work through sickness because of this. Be prepared to work at a minimum 50 hours a week after 6 months in, often hitting 60. Be prepared to work one or two weekends a month as well. When bringing this to the attention of our managers, we are told to "deal with it". The working from home policy is inconsistent based on department, direct manager, and seniority. With that out of the way, lets focus on the CS (Client Services) department. The roll is called a Technology Consultant or TC. The industry that we work in is filled with bottom of the barrel people. You will often find yourself explaining to a client how to open an email, drop in an image, explain how to open a different browser etc. Our sales process needs to vet if the companies we want to sign are worth our time. They will often have absolutely no IT team, and we will end up using more resources to support the client than money we collect. We are ALWAYS responsible for anything that goes wrong on an account, even when it is the clients fault. We have absolutely no leverage in telling our clients (or their managers at their respective companies.) that they are at fault for something. We always have to defend our sometimes hard to use software without being able to sympathize with our clients, this hurts our personal relationship with our clients tremendously as they view us to be blind of the shortcomings of our product. Myself and many colleagues in my department feel the same way about career development: Literally give up if your career path does not fit into their predefined roles. They claim flexibility in this when you start/are interviewing but that is a lie. The predefined rolls wouldn't be a big issue if they were at all diverse, but most of the time they are 90% the same job with that remaining 10% differing. I know this is why many of my friends left, and why many of us are now considering to leave. We are expected to give the same level of service to big and small clients alike, something that is not aligned throughout the company nor is it sustainable or scalable. This leads to tremendous frustration and lack of guidance for time management. Things they don't tell you about: On call - For one week (on a rotating schedule in a ~32 person department) you have to carry a phone with you and be prepared to answer a call from our clients from 8pm to 7am M-F and 24 hours a day on the weekend. They give you one vacation day in return, which you could argue is fair. They just tell you nothing about this during the interviewing process. Migrations - Luck of the draw here - Often many TCs have to stay up all night to receive a migration file from a previous provider to launch a new client. You are in no way compensated for these overnight or weekend extra hours, and are often expected to work normally the next day. We are not respected by the other departments. We are expected to QA features, launch new products, and train ourselves for new products. It took the department one year to learn how to properly deploy our survey feature because no one in our product or engineering team provided us with the proper training. All in all, I feel like we are in a glorified call center.