The most intensely unrealistic expectations of my career - Anonymous Toast Inc Employee Review

Beware - if you are in the Chicago office on the payroll side of the business, you will reap none of the benefits mentioned above or in general. The Chicago office is basically like working for a different company (this office/company, formerly Stratex, having recently been acquired by Toast). Toast will state that they are on an unlimited PTO policy (which we all know is a gimmick to begin with), but Chicago employees aren't allowed any time off in December or January for the holidays. The payroll product is so bad and clunky. Had I known how bad the product was, I never would have taken the job in the first place. It looks and functions like it was built in 1997 and never updated since. It's so difficult to use, that employees don't even understand how to use it - let alone guide our clients to be self sufficient within the system, as a true SaaS product should be capable of. The amount of time spent doing the most tedious manual tasks and fixing errors that the system should be built to prevent in the first place, but instead is a landmine of human error potential, is mind boggling. The worst of all though was the sheer lack of work life balance 1) because the product was bad which created more work for everyone in the long-run and 2) because the amount of projects assigned was so unmanageable, it was laughable. I was consistently working after hours (sometimes at 11PM and on weekends), and direct management was 100% aware but didn't seem to care. It was comforting to hear more senior leaders in the success division address the problem, but nothing was ever done about it. Project managers could be assigned 50+ implementations, which is so outrageous, particularly when you're spending hours on the phone each and everyday with potentially just ONE customer, due to them needing additional help within the system because it's so totally non-user friendly. The sheer project load is what really did it for me; no implementation team should ever be expected to manage that kind of volume if the company cared at all about client experience. It was simply impossible to provide a decent level of service due to the project load on top of the fact that the product was horrendously difficult to use. Even if you were allowed a day off, you'd never be able to catch up - because it was frankly just impossible to manage the workload to even begin with. This job made me so incredibly miserable, it made me physically sick due to the high amount of stress I was under.