Readit Newsjaz commented on Zenefits launches free payroll software for small businesses zenefits.com/payroll/?hn... · Posted by u/henryl
PSA: Go with Gusto (formerly Zenpayroll) instead for payroll. We signed up for both Zenefits and Zenpayroll several months ago. Zenefits was a nightmare. Zenpayroll has been an absolute delight.
They obviously don't offer identical functionality, but they're getting more similar now so this is a comparison of where they overlap.
Customer support: Both Zenefits and Zenpayroll are very responsive, but Zenefits provides significantly less helpful responses, the kind you'd expect from first-level big-corporation support. Zenpayroll is much better on this front.
Software: Zenefits is clearly not a startup driven by product or engineering. It's fine given it's free, but still has tons of rough edges and bugs everywhere (e.g. it's easy to click submit twice all over the site and create duplicate entries.) I know it's better than the incumbents, but Zenpayroll has a far better product and it really shows even in basic usage-- it's kind of amazing this level of quality now exists for payroll.
Health insurance: If you have an extremely simple situation and are a startup in CA, Zenefits is probably fine. We have about a dozen employees based in DC, SF, and NYC. Instead of telling us to go elsewhere, Zenefits spent two months and dozens of hours/email threads/phone calls making slow "progress", telling me information that ended up being inaccurate, omitting critical information, replying to one out of every three questions, saying repeatedly it would get done, and finally telling me they just couldn't do it.
The Zenefits rep could not have been worse-- if he'd been actively hostile or more clearly ignorant, that would have been better since we would have short-circuited sooner. (Yes, I did complain about the rep... they routed me right back to him on the same call.) Afterward, I called Zenpayroll and their rep was super knowledgeable and set expectations clearly. It was night and day. We also tried talking to Zenefits' partner Ubiquity for a 401k, and had a negative experience there as well.
We've now heard many, many versions of our story above. I wish Zenefits all the best since they've made a lot of startup founders' lives easier (including ours, for new hire onboarding), but boy do they have scaling issues... all I'm saying is, if you have the option of both Zenefits and Gusto for a particular service, 100% go with Gusto.
If you don't mind sharing, which providers did you end up using for health insurance and 401(k)?
Will Coderwall continue to exist, or is that shutting down as well?
jaz commented on Summary of the Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption aws.amazon.com/message/54... · Posted by u/spew
Does anyone keep stats on service outages for AWS, Axure, Google, et al?
The closest I've seen to that is this page: https://cloudharmony.com/status-group-provider
jaz commented on Show HN: Free Company Autocomplete API blog.clearbit.com/company... · Posted by u/maccman
Does anyone know if an API exists that returns whether a company is in good standing with a secretary of state?
Checked out the Clearbit API and I didn't see that type of data in there.
I work at a medium sized web agency (~60 employees) as a developer and consider myself introverted. For the first year I worked in a client facing role, which exhausted me - long hours, a lot of social interaction. It wore me down almost to the point of burnout. I then made a lateral move to a non client facing team which greatly improved my quality of life here. So there may be hope for you at a larger company that has non client facing roles - but you may need to work yourself up the ladder to get into them.
You can't change your underlying personality, but you can work on being more social. It's definitely not easy (at least not for me) - when in social situations during the workday, my internal monologue is usually saying "I'd rather be coding." It takes time and practice, but it's achievable. I've been working at being more social and have seen some success.
[0] https://code.gov/agencies
[1] https://github.com/nationalsecurityagency