Pros: Fully remote work, some very smart senior and staff developers, and good internal dev tooling. Local development and debugging are pretty smooth along with CI/CD. The culture was good until 2023.

Cons: Management and execs have become incredibly demanding since 2023. They push hard for new features without giving teams the time to scope them. Employees then take the blame and get let go immediately. I had a director literally tell me he "prioritizes work over family" in a one-on-one. Remote work here is deceptive because Samsara uses that to overwork employees. It is common now to be working from home during weekends or outside business hours. Oncall is the absolute worst. Depending on the team, expect about one week a month of never leaving your phone or computer. You can get paged at 3 AM, and you are expected to wake up and look at it. Your work metrics are also recorded to compare you to coworkers and serve as evidence to "up-and-out" you (fire you if not promoted).

Pros: - Smart tech (although open to some infringement claims right now) - Hard-working people - A mature product that sells well in the marketplace. Stock price will likely continue to rise. - Solid office in SF. - Some teams still working on new and interesting product lines, e.g., ML. - Established name in tech, so helpful on a resume for future roles. - Chance to work at a large customer scale.

Cons: Inexperienced people in wrong places making bad decisions. Serious accumulation of tech debt. In the "sales stage" of the Silicon Valley lifecycle, really trying to push up revenue and focus on sales instead of engineering innovation. Poor culture of accountability; leaders get poor visibility into problems, and problems get pushed onto the engineers. Bad engineering attrition, leaving new engineers to figure out what's what with little support. Sub-par documentation, which really hurts new engineer onboarding. Office was pretty dead. On-call culture (depending on team) was flat-out miserable.

Pros: - Great product - Inclusive culture - Great benefits - Modern stack (TypeScript/React, Go) - Work on hardware, firmware, FE/BE - Actually fast-paced in a good way - Mentor is great - Surprisingly stellar onboarding Only been here a week, but it seems like I definitely made the right choice. The company actively tries to take care of all of your needs, and the product is extremely interesting to build.

Cons: Maybe not everyone knows about Samsara... yet.