Sonder reviews

On the surface, Sonder is an exciting place to work. The company has survived Covid, is growing, and is in a creative/fun industry. However, if you look below the surface, there are a number of things that need to improve including:1. Culture/Leadership, 2. Pay/benefits, and 3. Career progression / development. It is shocking the number of super qualified employees (those who have worked at Google, FB, AirB&B, Lyft, Uber, McKinsey/BCG/Bain, and many strong start ups) who have left over the last year because of the things mentioned above. It is telling that many of these folks chose to leave in the middle of a pandemic...reasoning that staying at Sonder was so toxic that they'd prefer to look for new jobs in one of the worst job markets in recent history. 1. Leadership/Culture - This commentary doesn't apply to all leaders, but does apply to the CEO and others. One issue was that there never was a set company-wide strategy. The CEO is very smart, but he's not visionary and could never articulate a strategy that the rest of the company could anchor against. This led to very inefficient OKR planning cycles (I was part of many quarters of OKR planning and it never got better despite feedback...), cross-functional mis-alignment, and team frustration. Another area where leadership and culture were off was in how leaders weaponized our company values. Values such as 'act like an owner' or 'be optimistic and grateful' were constantly mis-used. I overheard one company leader tell a hardworking and impactful employee that they needed to 'act like an owner' as a means to get them to work more/harder (even though many this person often worked 10+ hour days). I've also seen some of the most shining people at Sonder be told they aren't grateful and positive enough. This is extremely demotivating and creates fear and mistrust w/in the company. On the note of trust, many leaders micromanage like crazy (e.g. leaders going around managers to attack their direct reports by getting into the weeds of their work and criticizing them). It was easy to often feel like one's work was never good enough as one could expect leadership to find flaws vs calling out good work and offering to partner with employees to take their work to the next level. Episodes like these led to folks breaking down. More than once I saw colleagues come to tears because of how some of the leadership team treated them. Lastly, I need to call out the many demeaning comments that came from the CEO. One prime example was when it was clear that many qualified people were leaving, the CEO told the entire company that if anyone wasn't happy at Sonder they could easily go find a job in a big tech company. This was hard for many to hear as not everyone had the ability to just sign up and easily get a job from Google. 2. Pay/benefits - Sonder offers massively lower comp vs other comparable companies (e.g. those in similar industries, with similar $ raised, with similar revenue etc). Even before the pandemic hit, it was clear Sonder was banking on the fact that it was a 'cool' company to make up for the gap in their average compensation vs the market median. In addition, no perks were offered throughout covid (e.g. $ to help us furnish our home work space, paying for internet, etc) while many smaller/less well funded companies offered the same to their employees. Similar to leadership's comments above..it felt like the message was 'you're lucky to work here' vs 'we are invested in our people and retaining them'. 3. Development / career progression - tied to the comment on pay/benefits, the lack of investment in people also extends to one's personal growth. It took Sonder until Series E (!) to finally hire a VP of People/HR. At of the time of writing this there was no company approach to career development (e.g. outline of the expectations at reach level so employee's had clarity on what they needed to do to get promoted) etc. I know of many people, including myself, who were constantly promised promotions or higher levels of responsibility only to have that carrot dangled indefinitely. I never felt like the company was really invested in me, but more like I was just a body to get stuff done, which made the decision to leave all the easier. Sonder's leadership has received the feedback above more than once in the last year but not enough has been done. Company wide engagement scores are still way low vs industry averages as they were when these issues were first flagged. I am hopeful Sonder will take this seriously and improve. I'm confident that if leadership is more compassionate and the company truly invests in its people, the company will shine and be a staple in the hospitality industry.

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.