Pros
Guild has at times been a great place to work. Pay was competitive, benefits were cool, and engineering consensus/decision-making was mostly visible. I liked my team and my manager, and we generally get along.
Cons
Most of what you do as a manager is deal with politics. This is an open secret. Many projects were started and finished with "saving face" or "buying trust" as the main goal; more often than not, this was more important than any identifiable business goal. Nothing at Guild is particularly stable. They introduced a new performance management structure every year I was there. Supposed to reduce bias, but actually likely enhanced bias. Quality engineers don't have a skill matrix, but the rest of engineering does. Though this was brought up multiple times, it was never officially addressed. Arbitrary pressure and fear. Evaluating an engineer as capable meant, according to leadership, that we should be "meeting all our goals" in the next quarter. (The problem of course is that the only goals put forth were arbitrary delivery timelines. Additionally, this assertion makes the work of all leaders essentially a non-factor in that success equation.) Managers were asked this year to "find" people who could be put on performance plans, a thinly veiled effort to avoid doing a larger RIF. This failed; 12% RIF in 2023, 25% RIF in 2024. Multiple smaller reorgs along the way, some that impacted people. This RIF happened to target not only people who just so happened to be in that "performance plan" group, but also quite a large number of people that were either on parental leave or about to go on parental leave. This means that while these people were out for a few months, Guild was planning an org structure that didn't include them. I cannot imagine anyone feeling comfortable going out on leave from Guild at this point. Poorly managed policy changes in general. Open PTO language was changed to be more restrictive, which wasn't openly announced until after it was discovered by a group of managers. Success metrics for many teams just simply don't exist. Your only imperative is to deliver features being planned by higher up people than you by some arbitrary date. Multiple occasions where I saw people take initiative, only to be shut down by higher level leadership for poorly defined (possibly non-existent) reasons. Overall, if you don't want to be the target of seemingly random company change that churns through people without a second thought, I'd sadly suggest you avoid Guild. On the flip side, you can do well here if you are incredibly politically savvy and enjoy the process of stepping on others to get ahead. If you don't really care much about actually producing quality work or investing in people, but are just looking to grow your own career at the expense of others, you might be in good company. You may also do well here if you have pre-existing relationships with powerful people, but be careful - you might become victim of a coup. While these many issues are true in many orgs, at Guild they are especially pronounced. Disclaimer: the current CEO is not Rachel Carlson, as Glassdoor reflects. It is Bijal Shah. My rating reflects Bijal's leadership, not Rachel's.