Samsara

• Super interesting and challenging product
• Smart engineers around

The middle management I worked with reacts to feedback in a highly unprofessional manner. Instead of working to improve, they blame you for not being a good fit for the environment (their exact words).

The hypocrisy of middle management is striking. They may give you positive feedback in person, but provide a completely different assessment to your direct manager or other internal stakeholders. Moreover, you have no visibility into this hidden feedback.

The incompetence of middle management (the so-called “roadmap keepers”) is evident. The long-term roadmap changes constantly, often without any clear reason. You might plan a major strategic piece of work and start executing it, only for it to be suddenly deprioritized. Then, after switching to something else, that same deprioritized initiative might reappear as the top priority.

This is not the expected agility of working with a backlog in response to new requirements or customer feedback. I’m talking about large strategic initiatives planned on a quarterly basis that keep shifting without justification.

The salary is fairly average. They expect you to work as if you were in a FAANG company, yet they are unwilling to compensate you accordingly.

For top management:

I believe the product is great, so keep building on it. However, take a closer look at why you need such a large layer of middle management. Some of them seem focused more on creating the appearance of work rather than delivering real results.