Toxic working environment(Dead End Job) - Anonymous employee Sage Employee Review

1.0
Oct 3, 2017
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

You get free fruit once in a while. My boss didn't care if my coworkers were off to their lunch break for 30 minutes or 3 hours. Outdated products/technology with people using forcing customers to upgrade products by misleading them, then being rewarded as top reps.

Cons

Management is disjointed. They have no care for their employees or their customers. Leadership decisions made without always looking at the big picture. Plenty of talented people have left. 30 or 40% potential bonus written in job letter that you never ever received. Top Management and manages eat bonuses. Sage continues to engage in business practices that negatively impact their employees at every turn. They continually cut employee benefits in an effort to boost financial performance perception, and they operate with the "do more with less people" mentality. They use a completely outdated process for performance management, forcing managers to have to arbitrarily score employees with "unsatisfactory and needs improvement" in order to hit the bell curve quota established by HR. Merit increases are tiny, even for high performers. Don't expect to be rewarded for your hard work in keeping their customers happy. They will continue to under-appreciate you and nit pick at you about meaningless arbitrary goals that have NOTHING to do with serving the customer. If you do work here, good luck trying to get a raise and promotion. You can work as hard as you can, exceed expectations, and receive zero recognition. You will receive a lot of empty promises, and despite the abundance of executives and upper management. I am Sage. I am a mediocre business software company with no real direction other than "reorganization". I am Sage. I punish employees who attempt to innovate and only allow creativity if one of the upper management staff comes up with an idea (i.e. steals it from subordinate employee and takes credit for it). I am Sage. I treat my employees as disposable resources. No one is valuable and I show no loyalty to them unless I need something. I am Sage. I believe the number of tweets my executives send will make us more successful in the US market rather than producing functional technology that customers want to buy. Please follow us. I am Sage. I will take away employee bonuses and terminate employees until our financials look good on the books and then turn a blind eye to how we have destroyed the internal structure and morale of our company. Don't ask how we are going to meet our numbers next year. I am Sage. I believe the closeness of the Atlanta airport is an amenity for my employees. (Yes I think staff truly believes that).

avatar
Sage Response
8y
Thanks for your feedback. Through recent campaigns to ensure no colleague can put our business at reputation or risk, each and every person across Sage is encouraged to report such behaviour. The SafeCall number if free and confidential. We don't cut employee benefits. The way the bonus system works is made clear. During 2015/16 there was a widely recognized lack of effective performance management at Sage. Some colleagues were under performing and were getting away with it, to the detriment of Sage and their fellow colleagues. Year end 2016 we applied a ranked distribution to push managers into a position where they had to manage underperformers. In order for Sage to succeed in the future, we had to address underperformance because we knew if it continued, Sage wouldn’t! Since applying the distribution, we have invested in the development of our managers through a program called Leading@Sage and we have begun to see a shift in managers being able and more willing to address underperformance, as well as recognize and appreciate great performance. For this year-end review process, we are not applying a forced distribution this is recognition that our management community are now more able to effectively manage and lead our colleague population. Please feel free to contact me if you wish to discus any part of this - glassdoor@sage.com Thanks again for your review.

Explore other reviews about Sage

5.0
Apr 28, 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good benefits. Strong company. Customer focus.

Cons

Frequent Executive changes. Trimming in Engineering teams interferes with product changes.

3.0
Apr 15, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

-Pay’s decent -Benefits are solid -The Sage Foundation feels like proper philanthropy -Some genuinely nice people -If you’re happy treating work as just a payslip and don’t mind things being a bit dull, Sage is actually quite a comfortable place to be. That stability is a real perk

Cons

-Far too many layers of middle management and general bureaucracy -The Ai push is getting a bit daft -Not especially innovative, so the work can feel quite uninspiring. I’m grateful to be employed, but if you’re after something more interesting, Sage will probably disappoint. That said, some people prefer it that way, fair enough -The office / hybrid requirements feel a bit pointless -Sage doesn’t tend to do layoffs, which is good, but it does mean there are quite a few people where you’re not entirely sure what they do. A lot of meetings, essentially. Even the positives come with trade-offs

4
avatar
Sage Response
1mo
Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughtful and balanced review. We’re pleased to hear that you value your compensation and benefits, as well as the work our Foundation do, among the areas you’ve highlighted. We also recognise the points you’ve raised around bureaucracy, innovation, and the pace and focus of change. Different people are motivated by different things at work, and it’s helpful to hear honest perspectives on how our structure, processes, and priorities can impact day‑to‑day experience and engagement. Feedback like yours helps inform ongoing conversations as we continue to evolve our ways of working, use technology more meaningfully, and improve the products and experiences we create for our customers. If you’re open to sharing further insight, we encourage you to do so through our Always Listening survey. Thank you again for your openness and for being part of Sage.
See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All