Samsara

C-suite is humble, smart, and cares about the company.

Most of management is well-intentioned.

People are friendly and help each other out.

Core business is on solid footing.

Samsara's engineering team has a large number of recent college grads. This means that if you're a recent grad, you can be handed a lot of responsibility here much faster than if you were at another similarly sized company.

• Nobody has ever been promoted to staff engineer. We have staff engineers, but they're mostly people who joined the company long before engineering levels existed, plus one or two people hired at that level. Senior SWEs who do outstanding, high-impact work get a pat on the back (we've gotten rid of raises).

• Directors and VPs have a heavy hand in evaluating perf for people they don't interact with. This means that the people who advertise their work the most do the best. Most of engineering has figured this out, so there's constant self-promotion.

• Management is not receptive to feedback. We used to give upward feedback quarterly and receive downward feedback semiannually; now we give upward feedback semiannually and receive downward feedback quarterly.

• The layoffs were bad for morale, and there hasn't been any effort to repair the damage.

• A lot of talent is leaving for better pay.

Do more listening and trust line managers more.