The previous few reviews have really inspired me to write mine. Thank you for the inspiration. This is going to be a long one, but I really want to share the inside story to help future applicants not make the mistake I made. I urge you to read this before you even think of interviewing with this company. To those who are on the inside, please do your part.
Sonder is nothing short of a cult. The product sounds very exciting and there is no shortage of words like rocketship and hockey-stick injected unnecessarily in every single all hands, slack channels etc. Brainwashed. The onboarding literally sells you Kool-aid to dream of sonder airlines and ski resorts. Yeah remember how cults work ?? This is the reason why you will see most of the pros for the company are about people, because we all sympathize with our colleagues who fell into the trap and made the mistake.
It is true that we were asked in all hands to write reviews on glassdoor and many positive reviews were indeed written by employees who would have benefitted from that. Once they all were let go after the covid layoffs, no more positive reviews. None.
I got many things to say. Hope its worth your time.
1) Leadership: This company does not have good leaders. That is a pretty bold statement to make, but hear me out. During the covid crisis, mostly if not all leaders only took a 15% paycut passing a large amount of burden to rest of the employees(everyone was forced to take a 15% paycut after 1/3 company was laid off). Yeah could have toned down their mansion life for a few days to save some jobs or make sure the low earning employees didn't have to take a paycut during these harsh times. The truth is, many of them dont belong in their roles. Mostly B or C grade leaders. Failed to inspire respect from employees when it really mattered the most. Yet I am expected to stay motivated as an employee and keep working so these underperforming and uninspiring leaders can take big money home.
Some took a 100% paycut. Unfortunately forgot to tell everyone that they have been living in a Sonder for > 2 years and still are. Imagine if someone paid your rent and bills. Must be easy to take a paycut, right ? Cult ! Remember!!
Why is leadership so weak?...brings to my next few points:
2) Pay: The pay at Sonder is extremely poor. You must be thinking it's a startup so they pay well in equity. Haha, its a joke. They lure you in by repeated use of words like IPO, rocketship and show you hockeystick graphs and you accept a lowball offer buying into the cult only to come in and realize, this company constantly operates in chaos mode. There are more spreadsheets that software here and humans are thrown at every problem. The software always keeps breaking. Spreadsheets done, so we just use them to find a way to get work done. Since I have joined the company I have been constantly hearing engineers keep leaving every month. I guess easy to find a better pay. If you dont pay enough, this is what you get.
3) Inefficiencies from the top:
1) Sonder principles: Leadership team took 6 months to come up with sonder principles. Made stickers out of them, only for us to realize most of them contradict each other. `When you prioritize relentlessly` and refuse to take on more work, they complain `You are not acting like an owner`. When things are done in a wrong way and you voice your disagreement because `You are obligated to speak up` your manager tells you people have been complaining that you complain a lot and are very negative. Cannot think of more examples, because they have lost their meaning just like the company has lost its way. But I am sure you will read more in further reviews to come. Ohh I remember, `Hire and develop the best` as you can see the leadership team is full of them and you pay so well that top talent is dying to come. See contradiction.
2) Performance review: Yeah this one too, took them a lot of time to come up with a new way to do performance reviews. It took more than an hour to do a single performance review. Yes, for 1 review, you had to keep writing for more than an hour. I feel bad for the third and fourth review I gave, I was brain dead by then and bored.
3) Hotels: Move to hotels was sudden. The company had barely figured out how to do apartments and then came hotels. Things broke left and right, customers complained, ground teams were struggling to keep up, customer service was put under a lot of pressure. Remember chaos mode ?? Yeah!!
4) People: Sonder is a real-estate company, not a tech company. Focus is a lot on real estate because what if software goes away, there are spreadsheets and humans to do the work. Just hire some cheap headcounts in other parts of the world. Why does one need engineers. Health insurance and benefits definitely not at par with other companies. For some reason, leadership thinks they are pretty good. Yeah in closed rooms , tell each other that. Never ask employees for feedback. Its almost going to be an entire year very soon sonder has not been able to find a VP of people.
Lastly, I wanna leave you with something to think about. Real estate and capitalism work hand in hand. They dont think what they are doing to communities and people because greed is such a wonderful thing. Sonder recently decided to open offices in montreal to hire engineers. They said its very hard to recruit here. Wait what, at sonder we run away from hard problems. Yeah, we solve them by working around them. Spreadsheets, remember ? They raise money in silicon valley and wanna spend it in montreal. How awesome is that. Imagine how San Francisco went into this housing crisis. When the big tech companies moved in and started paying people more. So our offers can outbid other companies to acquire talent. Sounds familiar right ? We are a hospitality company, people work here for passion and love for travel not to be a part of some investor pleasing company. I was so burned out that I am so relieved to finally have moved on. I had my doubts but the way prople were brutally laid off and some weak leadership being appreciated and wowed over and over again, I just lost hope. I wish it turned out to be the dream job that I had thought I had gotten into.
