Samsara

Sanjit is an incredible CEO.

We just significantly adjusted cash compensation and equity to compete with FAANG. Also, our equity is undervalued right now; our valuation is old from the peak of the pandemic.

Company still feels flat. All levels of engineering have a voice and can make a significant impact across the org.

Management is very receptive to feedback and continuously invests in making the company a better place to work.

Interesting and fun tech stack:

• Go
• GraphQL
• React
• React-Native
• AWS
• Cool real-time scalable ingestion pipeline
• All devs have access to data lake

Transparency: All employees can see board slides and Salesforce numbers. We all cheer for the sales team at the end of each quarter.

People are great. We have a lot of fun together. Made many friends at the company.

There have been tough times; I’ll detail some of them here. I still rate Samsara highly because many of the negatives were transient and have been resolved.

The layoffs due to the pandemic in 2020 were rough. It’s taken a long time to recover from that. There was a long string of attrition due to a lack of growth opportunities in leadership, general negative sentiment since our friends were laid off, and we needed to work hard to pick up the slack with less headcount. We’ve hired or are hiring like crazy now though, so this problem is quickly disappearing. We have tons of growth ahead of us. I’m excited to see what new business markets we enter besides fleet, industrial, and connected sites.

Cash compensation in the past left something to be desired, though this has since been fixed and strongly rewards top performers (top 10% TC across all software and hardware tech companies, including FAANG). I believe equity comp will be excellent by the time we exit, easily beating FAANG.

In 2020, we had a lot of new, inexperienced managers due to high growth in 2019. There were problems with micromanagement and challenges managing up to execs. This has been fixed, in part due to a change in attitude at the VP/exec level and in part due to an extensive six-month leadership training that all managers were required to go through. Things are much better now. Our internal employee happiness survey results are back to pre-COVID levels and very positive.

In 2019-2020, we experienced a lot of hypergrowth, and reliability was an issue. There were periods of long hours in order to stabilize our products for the new scale of customer base. We’re in a pretty good spot now; WLB is super reasonable. I never work more than 40 hours per week now.

The company always listens and changes for the better when there are dips in happiness, but some of the changes take a while (usually 3-9 months). You’ll need to have some patience to be happy during those times (not a problem for me, but it was for others).

Thank you for always listening to feedback. It’s great that execs read all the comments when we do our internal employee happiness surveys.

But make the team-building budget significantly larger. It’s important for people to be able to connect and get to know each other on a personal level, and these fun events help a lot. One or two events a quarter is too infrequent. It’s even more critical to have these as we are hiring a ton of new people this year, and many may still be remote.