Companies Worth Learning From: An Honest Look at Buffer

There's a common arc in startup careers, and if you ever worked in one yourself, you'll probably recognise it. Here's how it frequently goes for early hires:

They join a fresh startup and they love it. At the start, the job doesn't feel like a job so much as an extension of their life, because they're learning things they never planned to learn, picking up skills in areas they'd never expected to touch, finding real satisfaction in the chaos of early-stage building.

Then, as the company grows, it starts wanting more control, often accelerated by outside investment as boards, targets, and faster hiring reshape priorities. Early hires quickly recognise that something has changed - now there are right things to say and wrong things to say, right and wrong things to do and care about. The fun place to work transforms into something more corporate, more boring, more limiting. Eventually, the safest strategy becomes staying quiet, even when speaking up is "encouraged."

This is when the retreat begins. Curiosity, thinking, and genuine interest in growing the company together start migrating somewhere outside working hours. The same hires who could once see their future in the company for years to come suddenly start job-hunting, or pour their time and energy into side projects, until there's nothing left to give at work.

The research on why this happens is worth digging into properly. There's also a longer-running thread here: what separates companies that get this right from the ones that don't, and what can actually be learned from both - the good and the bad - so the same mistakes don't get repeated.

This is the first in a series called "Companies Worth Learning From," an investigation into what it actually takes to build a company that's effective and lets people thrive.

First up: Buffer. No particular reason beyond a LinkedIn job ad that sounded like a genuinely good place to work, and the question of whether the reality matches the pitch.

Let's find out in the next 8 minutes or so.

What Buffer Is and Why It’s Worth Looking At

Buffer is a social media management tool co-founded by Joel Gascoigne and Leo Widrich. Fully remote, bootstrapped almost entirely from revenue, with a team spread across more than 20 countries. Not a unicorn, not a household name outside the social media world.

The remote part wasn’t a pandemic reaction, by the way. The founders decided to be fully distributed and have no office way before it became the norm. (Joel wrote a great piece about this if you want to read it.)

And that’s what makes them interesting. They’ve spent over a decade consciously designing a company that’s a good place to work for people. They do things many companies would never even be brave enough to try: they publish all employee salaries publicly, they tested a completely flat structure with no managers (it didn’t work for them, and they brought hierarchy back in a different form), they moved to a four-day work week in 2020 and never went back, and they publicly share all their company decisions.

They’re not perfect. But they’re honest about it, which is more than most companies can say.

And when I was scouring the internet for employee reviews, I found both strong, genuinely positive opinions as well as some criticism about things that aren’t working that well.

Here, I’m sharing the good and the bad that I found, so we can learn together. But also, an important disclaimer: some reviews I grabbed were from as far back as 2017, which means that some of the issues they had then have most likely already been solved by now.

So when it comes to areas for improvement, it won’t be directed at Buffer, but rather at other companies that are going through such issues right now.

I also don’t want to hide the fact that I don’t have direct access to, nor knowledge of, what things actually are or were like inside Buffer, and, as such, please treat everything I write as hypothetical. :)

The Numbers Everyone Can See

Most companies treat information like a competitive resource, where salaries are private, revenue is confidential, and decisions get made in rooms most employees never enter.

The logic is usually that secrecy prevents conflict and gives power.

Buffer took the opposite approach.

They publish every employee’s salary, along with the exact formula used to calculate them, on their website for all employees and the world to see.

They didn't do it all at once, though. First came the formula, then they shared it internally, then they made it public. Each step worked, so they took the next one. When the salaries went live on their website, job applications jumped 229%. Turns out people just want to know the rules.

And when they’re visible, you can’t accidentally (or deliberately) pay people differently based on things that have nothing to do with their work.

This was an idea that took root early. Leo Widrich, who co-founded Buffer with Joel, wrote at the time that “one of the most relieving things about making salaries transparent at Buffer was that we haven't had a single salary negotiation happen.” Leo left the company in 2017, but the transparency culture he helped build stuck.

This matters for remote companies, especially. When your team is distributed across several countries, information can hold everything together. Without it, people fill the gaps with assumptions, and assumptions breed anxiety.

What you can try: You probably already know that people discuss salaries even when companies forbid it. So you might as well be transparent about it and save everyone from the assumptions that fill the gap when they don’t know.

And you, of course, don’t have to publish everyone’s salary publicly overnight. Start by sharing how pay decisions get made. What’s the formula? What factors go in? Why does this person earn more than that person? If you can answer those questions clearly and fairly, then that’s a very good start. If you can’t, sort that first. Transparency only works if what you’re revealing is something you’re proud of.

The same logic applies beyond salaries. Regular all-hands meetings where you share where the company actually stands (not just the wins, but the hard stuff too) go further than most leaders expect. People don’t need everything to be perfect, but they need to know what’s happening around them, so that they don’t get surprised.

They Removed the Hierarchy and Then Brought It Back

Sometime around 2014-2015, Buffer went completely flat. Inspired by Frédéric Laloux’s book Reinventing Organisations (which also influenced my own thinking about organisations), they removed all managers, stopped all one-to-ones, and let people choose freely what they wanted to work on.

But the change has turned out to be more difficult than they originally expected.

New employees had no idea where to focus. Experienced employees couldn’t figure out how to help anyone because there was no structure. People had complete freedom and also no idea what to do with it. On their blog, Leo even wrote that they took more of a “sink or swim” approach, removing mentoring and coaching sessions that they previously had in place, and discovered that the absence of hierarchy isn’t the same as freedom - it’s just overwhelming.

In any group of humans, some people have more experience, more context, and more relevant knowledge than others. That’s not a hierarchy a company creates - it’s just reality. When you pretend it doesn’t exist, you don’t eliminate it, you just make it invisible. This can be very hard on anyone new to the company and this style of working.

Soon after they learned of their mistake, Buffer brought back mentoring, one-to-ones, and made space for higher-level strategic thinking to be explicit again. They called their new structure an “actualised hierarchy” - a hierarchy that emerges naturally from experience and contribution. As Buffer's developer Niel de la Rouviere put it, it’s “a representation of hierarchy rather than one that was designed or prescribed.” People higher up don’t get veto power over those doing the work - but their experience is recognised and used. Which I think is pretty cool.

What you can try: Before removing structure, ask what that structure is actually doing for your people. If it’s mainly there to maintain control, you may want to relax it and give people more room to self-organise. But if it helps with coordination, clarity, or support, removing it could create new problems.

The goal shouldn’t be to have less hierarchy or to become fully flat. The goal should be to create structures that help people do their best work. Sometimes it means a flatter hierarchy, sometimes more guidance and mentoring.

And if you do want to move towards self-management, don’t remove support at the same time. Keep mentoring, one-to-ones, clear guidance and expectations.

Most importantly, don’t turn the organisation upside down overnight. Introduce new ways of working gradually. Help people understand what self-management looks like in practice, listen to their concerns, and learn together what level of autonomy makes sense for your team and context.

The Friday Question

In May 2020, Buffer switched to a four-day work week as a pandemic experiment. They explicitly didn’t set productivity goals because they expected output to drop.

It didn’t. Not only that, 91% of Buffer employees said they were happier and more productive.

But here’s the thing that often gets missed when companies try to copy this: it only worked because Buffer redesigned the work, not just the calendar. Buffer explains that meetings became more intentional, asynchronous communication became the default, people got better at prioritising because they had to, and work that existed just because it had always existed got cut.

Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Except that some Buffer employee reviews tell a different story. Several people noted that the four-day work week only really works if your workload fits into four days. If it doesn’t (and for some teams it doesn’t), Friday becomes a catch-up day. Nobody mandates it, but the expectation to keep up is there. Evening and weekend work isn’t unheard of either.

This is exactly what I experienced at a company that introduced half-day Fridays. It was great for people who could use it, but absolutely useless for people whose workload never decreased. In fact, some people felt more anxious about staying to do the work they had left when others would start packing up for the day.

What you can try:

• Treat the non-working day the same as Saturday. Work not done? Pick it up on Monday. Make this explicit so people don’t feel guilty logging off. Leadership needs to make this sound like a new default, so that employees don’t feel guilty for having a day off if it has been busy.

• Do regular workload audits at the team level. If people can’t get away with four days, that just shows that a role needs to be redesigned or additional resources are needed.

• Use 1:1s to ask: what could be automated, eliminated, or delegated so this role actually fits four days? Make it a real conversation that makes people properly think about it. With AI, outsourcing repetitive, manual tasks is easier than ever, so cutting a 5-day work week into 4 days should theoretically be easier than ever before, too.

• Don’t add new projects without removing something first. A 4-day work week with a 5-day workload is just a policy on paper that’s never used.

How Do You Make Decisions Without Getting Stuck?

To get decisions made, Buffer introduced something they call the advice process, paired with a decision-making model.

The idea was that the person closest to a problem could make the decision, but not before they asked for input from people who’d be affected by the decision and those who had relevant expertise. The goal was not to reach consensus, but to gather the advice so they could decide.

Buffer’s principle was this: The worst trouble you’ll get into won’t be for making a mistake, but for not asking for advice.

In most companies, people avoid making decisions because they don’t want to be blamed if it goes wrong. So they escalate, and then they wait for someone else to do it.

Does it work perfectly? No. Buffer openly said that it’s one of the harder things to get right, and it slows down even more as organisations grow. But the underlying principle is something any small team could start practising informally tomorrow and see if it helps teams make decisions more easily.

What you can try: Pick a decision that's coming up. Instead of making it yourself or sending it to a group, nominate the person closest to the problem. Ask them to gather input from two or three relevant people and then make a decision. Start small, build from there, and see what happens.

When The Culture Goes Wrong

I went through as many employee reviews as I could find online. The positive ones are consistent and feel genuine:

“Some of the kindest people and most supportive culture I’ve ever experienced.”

“This has been my first job where I wasn’t expected to constantly check in with my manager. This kind of freedom is quite liberating.”

“Lots of freedom and trust. Positive environment. Strong culture. CEO cares about doing the right thing.”

At the time of writing this, 72% of Glassdoor reviewers would recommend Buffer to a friend, which is pretty high.

But there’s another set of reviews, and I think they’re just as useful to pay attention to. For learning purposes.

Please note again that some reviews go back as far as 2017, so chances are that most have already been solved. As mentioned earlier, this exercise is to address issues that nearly every company experiences, rather than treating these as actual issues that Buffer currently has.

Growing Up Inside a Company Doesn’t Make You Ready to Lead It

Multiple reviewers noted that most of Buffer’s leadership grew up inside the company and were promoted for being early rather than for having led organisations at the stage they’re at. The result: reactive, informal, and inconsistent decision-making, shifting priorities, reversed decisions, founder moodiness, and frequent mind-changing, as well as people feeling that they need to manage up and bring “fake” good news to leadership rather than the truth. And I saw at least one person mentioning that they think people are leaving the company due to leadership issues more than anything else.

This is probably a reality of almost every founder-led startup. And if you’ve ever worked at a startup, you probably know exactly what it’s like.

Being an employee in such companies is difficult. But so is being a founder or a leader, growing a company for the first time, so no judgment here at all.

Here’s how I’d advise a company to improve such leadership issues with the limited knowledge and context I have:

• First - get yourself an external advisory board. People who’ve actually been where you are, at the exact size you’re at right now, and survived it. You don’t know what you don’t know, and someone who’s already figured it out can save you a lot of expensive mistakes. And while you’re at it, actually collect honest feedback from your team about how they feel about the leadership, and do something with it.

• Invest in the people who are already there. If your team is frustrated with leadership, what they're really telling you is that they need someone they can trust and learn from. And now they apparently can’t for one reason or another. Give your most promising people real development support - not a one-off workshop here and there, but actual coaching and a structured learning path teaching how to lead within your specific setup, so they can later guide others instead of just surviving.

• And founders, please take your emotional regulation seriously. I say this with zero judgment, because the pressure is real and the stakes are high. But when you're unregulated, it doesn't stay with you. It moves through the whole team. People start reading your mood before they read their emails or bring you news. Get a coach, a therapist, a trusted advisor - whatever works for you. Just don't leave your team to absorb what you’re trying to process in real time - this negatively impacts culture, work, how employees feel, performance - everything.

What Happens When Optimism Is Mandatory

Several reviewers pointed out that due to the culture of kindness and optimism, it’s difficult to raise concerns, challenge ideas, ask direct questions, or push for accountability without being viewed as “not aligned.” Problems get reframed rather than resolved. One person said that the company asked for honesty, when it’s clear that it’s not welcome. Real talks are taboo, and there’s a culture of not addressing the “elephant in the room.” One reviewer even said that the openness Buffer advertises on LinkedIn doesn’t match the internal reality.

Now, generally speaking, positivity is great, and we do need more of it. But when a company prides itself on being all positive and kind, employees can start to feel that they can’t share their real thoughts if those thoughts are less positive. This means information is filtered, problems are ignored, and people slowly build resentment.

So what to do?

• Introduce low-friction anonymous channels to share unfiltered feedback and concerns, so your team can share their real opinions and feelings without the risk of appearing “not aligned”.

• Introduce pre-mortems as a standard practice that everyone is encouraged to follow. So before any significant decision or change, ask colleagues to share all the ways it could fail. This way, “negativity” becomes a meaningful role that is celebrated in concrete contexts rather than a personality trait that everyone avoids presenting.

• Accept that positivity and real kindness can hold a hard conversation. If your culture falls apart the moment someone says something uncomfortable, it wasn't kindness - it was politeness. Problems aren't the enemy of a positive culture, and every issue you're willing to define, own, and fix is just the culture getting better at being what it said it was.

Nowhere to Go From Here

Several employees shared concerns that the company wasn’t expanding and that there was nowhere to go. A few highlighted that people should stay there for two years max and then move on somewhere with better prospects, as ambitious people will hit the ceiling quickly.

In a company that’s not scaling fast, you can’t offer traditional upward mobility, but you can:

• Offer lateral mobility instead. Help people go deeper or broader. Let them get involved in different projects to learn new skills, or introduce a development plan that allows employees to actively progress in ways that matter to them.

• Create skill-based progression with concrete, named steps, so that they have something to strive for even when a new title isn’t available. It doesn’t mean they’ll never leave for roles they’re ready for in other companies, but it does mean they’ll find their work more engaging and motivating until they do.

When the Inner Circle Doesn’t Change

At least a couple of people shared that influence sits with a small group of early employees, mostly white and mostly male. People outside that circle find it hard to advance or make an impact. Buffer has also had noticeable turnover in DEI leadership roles. The gap between the inclusion messaging and the actual power structure is significant, according to some.

This one is more common than most people want to admit. Informal power naturally pools around the people a founder trusts most - and founders tend to trust people who remind them of themselves. So if the founder is a young white male, the inner circle often ends up looking a lot like him. Not always on purpose, just out of comfort.

What to do?

• Map where the real informal power actually sits and check whose ideas and opinions are the loudest and most visible. If that map doesn’t reflect the values you say you have, start building routes for others to access the same influence.

• Work on psychological safety and be aware that people from underrepresented groups may feel less comfortable speaking up than others. Equity is not about giving everyone the same conditions and opportunities, but about adapting them to fit different groups of people. This means that you may need to create structured pathways for minorities to access the same level of power, or you may need someone to specifically advocate for them and their ideas.

• And if you have a DEI team - give them actual power. A DEI team that only gets to execute other people's decisions isn't changing the structure. They need a seat at the table and a company that cares about the changes they’re trying to make.

Not Perfect, But Designed to Improve

It looks like Buffer is really trying to be a great, human-centred company. They’re transparent about their failures, their learnings, and their wins. There are no mandatory online hours and no screen monitoring. And it’s not just marketing - it’s backed by policies: unlimited vacation, flexible schedules, and a budget for coworking or home office setup.

But none of this means the company is perfect, or that every single person who joins is happy with everything inside it. I don’t believe any company is. So if you’re a founder, and you experiment with things to make your work and your company better and still receive criticism, you’re in quite good company.

Just stay open to honest feedback and ready to address the most frequently mentioned issues. You probably won’t have a perfect company no matter how hard you try, but you can make it better with each decision you make.

What I think matters most is that Joel’s goal is basically to give employees more freedom than almost any other company would dare to. And he made a big decision to protect that. Back in 2018, Joel spent $3.3 million buying out their main VC investors - choosing long-term independence over the typical venture path of growing fast and chasing an exit. Buffer grows slowly. Some people don’t like that. But it’s sustainable, and it’s his. This basically means that Buffer is against hustle culture and growth at all costs, because he wants to build something that doesn’t require sacrificing health or relationships to keep it alive. He'd learned this the hard way - by 2017 he'd been through Buffer's first round of layoffs, lost his co-founder, and burned out badly enough to take six weeks off. The calm and vision he talks about now were built on the back of that.

And here’s the part that, to me, proves the model actually works. A few years ago, after nine straight years of growth, Buffer went through the biggest decline in its history - revenue dropped around 20% over four years. That’s the exact kind of thing that makes most companies abandon their values, cut their perks, and start laying people off. But Buffer didn’t lay off a single person. Not during the pandemic, not during the decline - and they came out the other side back to growth and profitability.

That’s the difference between a company that says it cares about people and one that’s designed to actually protect them when things get hard.