Sonder reviews

Sonder has a strong culture of driving employees to exhaustion, then firing them. They usually fire employees before the end of their first year, so they won't get any of the shares they promised. If it happened once or twice, it could be an accident. But with Sonder, it is a system. Very few people survive their first full year with Sonder. If you are interviewing there, just ask your interviewers how long they have been working with Sonder. You will discover that all of them started within the last year. There's almost nobody that's been there for over a year, and literally nobody (except the founders) been there for over 2 years, even though the company has existed for over 3 years. All this is well-hidden in the interview process, and employees discover this terrible history only after joining the company.

Sonder has bad leadership that starts at the very top with the CEO and trickles all the way down. They hire people with flashy CVs and HBS/Uber/Lyft, MBAs, top-tier consulting brands who are not good people managers. These are people who are good at doing many things, but are not suitable for the business and getting in the weeds. Sonder needs to realize they're a hospitality company, not a sexy Silicon Valley start-up. They are similar to the Hyatts, Marriotts and Hiltons of the world - operations is their bread and butter, yet they treat people doing the front-line, guest facing roles horribly. Even speaking from an Operations Manager view, they do not treat Hospitality Agents well. They ask Hospitality Agents to use their own car and their own phones and expect them to be able to afford the newest iPhones to optimize the Sonder apps. HAs cannot afford this and keep gas in their cars at the same time! Stop selling the job and the dream, be realistic with people on what they're getting into or else it only leads to disappointment. This also goes for Operations Managers. Be realistic. There is no growth opportunity. They will never promote an Operations Manager to General Manager. Several high profile and longer-tenured OMs and SOMs recently started this conversation and it was shut down quickly and they were told no or they were not ready and have subsequently left the company. I am a more junior Operations Manager and am not eligible yet for promotion, but it was demoralizing to see this happen to people I respect. I am embarrassed that I pulled people from my hotel life over to Sonder and sold them on the dream from housekeepers to team members. And now I'm apologizing for the experience they're having. They incentivize real estate and it is clear where they put their priority even though they are an OPERATIONS business. Through COVID-19, while everyone else was asked to take a pay cut, the real estate business development team (HREs) did not and also got 5% bonus of all the rent deductions they negotiated. This was up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in larger markets who have expensive rents and a large number of buildings. This would only make sense in smaller markets like mine with under five buildings. While people were worried about paying their bills and laughing that the government stimulus check only paid for two weeks worth of rent, the real estate team was raking it in. This is again where Sonder's true principles lie. They do not care about operations. For a service company, the customer service is completely broken. We have had guests try to reach the GET team for hours on the phone and gotten no response. The way they bridge this gap is using the Operations team and stretching everyone beyond their capacity. Everyone is expected to answer their phone at all hours of the night as Manager on Call. Sonder also is not a tech company. Read through the detailed engineer's review from a month ago. The engineering stack is not advanced. The turnover on the engineering team has gone through the roof and all the good engineers have left. Do not join if you are an engineer as the tech here is outlandish and we want to call ourselves a tech-driven company. This is not even a tech-enabled company.