Samsara

• Easy to work on a lot of greenfield initiatives.
• Dev culture is supportive & people are generally very friendly.
• Equity program.

• Operational guidelines change seemingly randomly. One year, the rubric for performance reviews was updated two weeks before the actual review cycle started.

• The company also recently decided to focus on "Eliminating Bureaucracy" as an operating principle, but is not consistent about enforcing this as a standard. So, there is lots of red tape for devs and less for leadership.

• Praise and promotions are focused more on leadership and product-facing employees rather than developers. There are teams where no devs have been promoted in years, despite high delivery and impact.

• It's a very long process to hire engineers. VPs apparently need to sign off on hiring decisions and can veto a candidate even if they have been approved by the hiring committee and engineering team.

• Testing is sacrificed in favor of speed, so teams spend a lot of extra time fixing bugs and handling incidents rather than building features.

• All legacy systems have been offshored. So, if you're in the US working on a project that relies on an existing feature that's now managed in Poland, you will have to work odd hours or deal with a time gap between all communications.

• The company does not offer "unlimited PTO". It's really four weeks, and it has become more heavily scrutinized over the years. Many other benefits have been reduced as well, such as caregiver and medical leave, and some initiatives like Sabbatical fully revoked.

• This company is definitely operating like a startup even though it's 10 years old. Con for me, but maybe it's a pro for others.

• Surveys are sent out to developers to gauge happiness, but the results are not discussed with the developers themselves. Feels like nothing comes out of speaking up.

• Hire more engineers!

Many senior devs have quit and their roles haven't been filled in over a year, putting real strain on the devs that remain.

• It seems like most developers are doing both the job of an engineer and a product manager, without the recognition. PMs should take more time to investigate customer needs/feature designs before coming to developers and having them design the feature themselves. Last year, a developer was told to create a feature on a very short timeline and demo it to execs, who then nitpicked the feature and responded that the developer should be on more customer calls to understand the customer needs better. It should be the PMs responsibility to ideate and suggest the correct features!