Guidewire Reviews

Cons

- Methodologies are sometimes outdated and it can be difficult to change the internal status quo.

Cons

Is not close to the city center

Cons

Less pay. Very less chance to learn new technologies and very less development work involved in day-to-day work.

Cons

Proprietary technology - so it can be really hard to find a job if you spend too much time at Guidewire, especially if it's your first experience.
Salary is ridiculous.

Cons

Very low pay.
Insane training.
    Training is long, rigid and very hard.
    (tip - learn as much about insurance before starting)
Toilets can be filthy at times. * Cleaners are excellent, it's just that some workers aren't hygienic.
Own language - Gosu (very close to java though)

Cons

Expanding too fast, which results in teams working in their own silos

Cons

Commuting is horrible (45 minutes go and 45 minutes return), there is only one regular bus from the city center that leaves every thirty minutes in the morning an another free bus that leaves in the morning which is old and stinky, it is provided by the city and it ussually fails, breaks or doesn't even arrive and also has only one time in the morning and one in the afternoon. The company is used to paid taxis to the employees, but you have to share them and use an arcaic billing system scan the receipt, whatever the price of the taxi is they only provide a limited amount.

Time is flexible, but due to the buses everybody is forced to arrive at 9am and leave at 5:30pm unless you want to get the regular bus (every 30 minutes) or have a car.

Salary is below the average, it is reviewed once a year and the increase is ridiculous, like 1K per year in total supposing you got good reviews, they give you a bonus of around 2K to compensate, but it is out of the salary.

A couple of years ago when the CEO decided to start saving money. Some consequences were:
-They used to give shares to every new employee, but no more, because they were being diluted (according to CEO own words). But that doesn't stop to keep giving shares to all the managers and Americans, seems that only if you work in EEUU you deserve shares. There are blackouts of three months to garanty that the price doesnt do a nosedive. Every 3 months that blackout is opened for a few weeks and everybody sell like crazy. If you leave the company and did not sell your stock, you lose it, so you are force to sell everything almost immediatelly after leving the company.
-There used to be Consultant 1, 2, 3 and Senior. it usually took a year from 1 to 2, 2 years from 2 to 3 and another 2 years from 3 to Senior. Now they removed category 3 just to save money, the time is still the same, it takes 4 years from 2 to Senior and a lot of pain and patience. They lie to you saying that you are an "Strong" candidate, but it isn't until you complaint for months that you are promoted. Ironically emails are sent to all the company every month with the new promotions and after a while you realise that faces are repeating themselves from email to email and they are usually Irish.
-Food and outside activities had been considerably reduced and cheapened, it is impossible to find a banana or a chocolate on a Friday.

People is dirty, it was necessary to go to the extreme of hiring two cleaners with the only purpose of constantly put dishes in the dishwashers.

There is a big kitchen with fruits, snacks and coffee, but not real food. During breakfast or afternoon there is always something to eat, but at lunch time you have to order using a catering service or walk to the only "restaurant" (they only have salads, sandwiches, cakes and baked potatoes) at walking distance.

Training is long, painful and endless. When a new guy arrives he has to spend 2 weeks with the basic training and after that a test exam of 5 hours (YES 5 hours) after that another 2 or 3 weeks more of training with another test at the end, then 2 weeks with one of the products and a demo of one hour with questions about insurance, and when you are done, the cycle starts again up to three times depending if they have some project available for you. It is normal to not start working in anything at all until the third or fourth month after 4 test (5 hours each) and 3 demos done.
Sadly when you start working you can not consider yourself free of the training. Every 2 years they release a new version of all the products and you are forced by the managers to pass the new exams for those versions, so if you passed the exams (certifications) of 3 of them when you arrived, you have to repeat another 3 tests every 2 years.

Important: This company does not earn their benefits with the project they develop, they earn it selling licenses to the clients.

Development is in GOSU, a weird mix between Java and Scala, it is free software but not supported, not even by the company who created it, nobody knows it and nobody uses it apart from them, but when there is an error, you will see the familiar Java messages. It is only a wrapper of Java that internally creates Java classes and .class objects, so it is Java with an awful makeup. The development kit is a tuned copy of Eclipse and IntelliJ, but they feel really proud of that even knowing that it is constantly broken and failing. Compiling one product first time from OOTB (out of the box) could take nearly an hour.

The methodology is Agile Scrum, if you understand it by everyday meetings of 30 or 40 minutes long were 90% percent of the time is the manager asking you for a greater effort or extra hours in some cases. Sprint plannings take 4 or 5 hours meetings during one or two days consecutivelly, you better get a pillow for those meetings.

The extra hours are "voluntary" but they are NOT being reflected in the billing and never being paid thanks to an explicit agreement clause.

Developers must have meetings with clients and must (it is mandatory) do demos (up to 3 hours) of the product to the client after development stage is finished. Testers are external working in India with 8 hours difference and nobody figured out yet how a team of ten people per project can produce only one defect a week of the kind "You missed a coma in that screen title" but do not see the Nullpointers appearing every time you click Next.

They are hiring lots of graduates and juniors to save money, turnover is high, every week 2 or 3 people leaves the place.

Once a year there is a "Service Event" which consist in 2 days meetings in an hotel in Washington, Dallas, Chicago or somewhere at that time slot, arriving Thursday night to the place and leaving Sunday morning. If it is the first time you do it could be an interesting experience, but not for a second.

Every new guy starts on GSC department, the cool stuff is only for the "Development" team, if you want to became a "real" developer and not a consultant prepare yourself to repeat internally all the interview proccess and wait years of lies for an opportunity.

Cons

The salary is ridiculous, the technology is something you wont use anywhere else. The company has its own language if you got the integration part is not that bad but in the functional part it is just drag and drop, very boring job. And the upgrade projects are also deadly stressful.
My manager doesnt care about my career path and what I want to do.
From the benefits in kind you have to pay 50% of the total in taxes, let's say if the insurance is 2K you will pay 1K of taxes per year, awful. The bonus and all extra you also have to pay taxes.

Cons

Specific tech stack (Gosu) makes it difficult for graduates to get work after especially after 3-4 years

Cons

Sometimes too process oriented as opposed to focusing on what produces the best results. Very often seems like "Operation was successful, but the patient is dead."
The flat management approach doesn't always work. It slows down decision making and causes a lot of inconsistent approaches for solving the same problem. Loads of reinventing the wheel happening.