Poor execution and no direction - Engineer Deel Employee Review

1.0
Sep 1, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Flexibility - The company truly believes that employees should be able to work from anywhere. All employees work from home which adds a lot of value to your everyday.

Cons

Lack of experienced management - Most of the manager/directors I encounter had noticable little experience on what they were doing. I would say that the barrier of entry has been very low to allow the head count to grow exponentialy. Of course this comes with negative consequences. There is a massive lack of mentorship and solid direction, a very critical aspect when the majority of the workforce has only a couple of years of professional experience. Undefined expectations - I believe this tights to the point above. When you have inexperienced management, the requirements and expectations that come from them tent to be ridiculous. I'm not talking about tight deadlines nor challenging projects (those are everywhere and are part of most jobs). The expect projects to be completed with out any outlines. Or software to be developed by inexperienced people with virtually no supervision nor support. Low salaries - While it is great that you can work from anywhere, it also means that the company hires from anywhere. That fuels a race to the bottom when it comes to compensation. The company will aim at giving an average salary depending on where you are from (while trying to lowball you). However, you might be competing with some else who is willing to do the job for half. Also, once you get in, forget about bonuses or significant salary inincreases. Stock package - This portion tights to the compensation but it should have its own note. While the very early employees (first ~100) should benefit from their stock options, for the rest is not the same. While discussing salaries this will be a sales point that they will try to hammer down. People who have recinly joined should not expect they stock package to make them millionaires. However, they still try to make new people believe so to low-ball their base salary. Overall not a great place to learn nor earn.

avatar
Deel Response
3y
This is incredibly helpful, specifically from the engineering point of view. I also 100% agree that we must build best practices for Deel at our current and planned scale that aligns with the complexity of our workforce sitting remotely across the world, we need to communicate and educate on our total rewards philosophies and practices (ie we have annual compensation review and quarterly promotion cycles - but we just launched them in July as we were just 12 months into true scale and product to market as well as headcount growth), and we must continue to improve upon our hiring practices across the board but specifically for senior management and leadership to your point. As with most start ups we have promoted and even hired first time managers, which means that we must double down on training and management development. We have specifically been looking to balance our internal promotions with external hiring to ensure that we bring on people that have the experience to scale Deel for us and for our customers. This initiative will continue as we have senior roles open. You are also spot on with objectives and key results being clearly defined and scoped. This has been a work in progress for the past 6 months specifically and we are still learning and developing our process as its still been very fluid with how fast we are growing, adding new people, and needing to scope work. Finally, regarding total compensation, we do have a location based pay philosophy. Some companies do and some companies don't. Since we do, we look at market rates for the job in the country of residence of the person becoming a contractor or employee to extend a competitive offer. We do not intend for less expensive talent to win out over more expensive talent though - we desire to hire the best, most qualified person for Deel independent of where they sit. So this is something I want to take back to the team to ensure is not happening as you say or does not continue to happen. For stock compensation, this is typical - earlier team members took bigger risks and as the company continues to move through funding rounds the risk for people who join in these later stages is less so we see stock option grants acclimate to the risk and funding round. We do have new hire grant targets by job profile (and these are global targets, not local) and its important to us that team members are owners and have the opportunity for a payout and reward at an IPO or liquidity event. We need to do better at communicating the value, which is still significant, to candidates, new hires and incumbent team members. Overall, relevant review and we appreciate it!

Explore other reviews about Deel

5.0
May 13, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great management and nice people in the company.

Cons

no cons really but if I have to say one thing, it would be 401K can be higher to match.

2.0
May 25, 2026
Anonymous contractor
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Fully remote - Mostly nice and talented people, you can learn a bunch and the atmosphere is good in the beginning - Once you realize you're not ever getting a raise you can get by doing bare minimum - You can write the ceo on slack and he will respond, which is actually insane considering its such a huge company

Cons

- Everyone is underpaid, even the senior directors. They present employee equity as extra compensation, but make it very difficult to sell shares at secondaries. - Raise/promotion policies are set up in a way where most ppl will never get it. I've seen superstar employees get 2% annual raise. The rest got 1%. - Pay is localized, so you can do the same exact job but get pay half of the compensation if you're not based in the US. - It's either employee contract for less money, and you have some employee rights given to you by your country, or more money but you're getting misclassified on a b2b contract and using vaction days when you get sick. The actual work requirements and responsibilities are the same in both cases. - If you're not drinking the koolaid you better fall in line and keep any opinions challenging the status quo to yourself - Manager can get pretty manipulative, they'll say anything to appease you, but will not act in your interest unless it aligns with their internal politics play

See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All