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      Sonder

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      Sonder Reviews

      2.7

      27% would recommend to a friend

      (724 total reviews)
      avatar

      Francis Davidson

      23% approve of CEO

      12% positive business outlook

      Sonder has an employee rating of 2.7 out of 5 stars, based on 724 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an average working experience there. The Sonder employee rating is 30% below average for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

      Reviews by job title

      724 reviews
      2.0
      7 May 2020

      Tons of potential, held back by poor leadership

      Senior software engineer/engineering manager
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business outlook

      Pros

      First, a disclaimer: I was a voluntary departure, not related to the recent COVID layoffs. It's hard to talk about Sonder without separating individual teams from company leadership. I'll cover leadership in the next section. Teams at Sonder generally have good ownership of products and their parts of the stack, and consist of 5-10 people. Most of the developers, designers, and PMs are wonderful people, and, with very few exceptions, I would happily work with any of them again. There are a lot of talented folks and opportunities to learn from your co-workers, and most teams have developed their own cultures. Teams can really have that start-up-y, familial feel to them. This was my favorite part of working at Sonder by far. The tech stack is pretty outdated, and there's *a lot* of tech debt, but there are teams that are working hard to improve things and modernize. For instance, there's a grassroots movement towards microservices (Sonder mostly runs on an enormous Rails monolith), and most new frontend apps use React/ReactNative/Typescript/GraphQL. With a bit of luck, and a ton of personal effort, you can definitely push for things like this on your team. However, read between the lines here: you won't get support from leadership for this type of changes. More on that below. Lastly, if you enjoy working on engineering challenges that have physical world implications, there are a lot of interesting things that Sonder is either already doing, or will likely have to take on in the near future. One example is a team that focuses on remote access to units. Most units come with IoT-enabled locks, and cycling access codes securely is a cool problem. Another example is a set of teams that focusing on "guest experience". Every unit needs to be cleaned between guest stays, and some guests experience issues, or request deliveries, etc. All of these cases require a Sonder city team employee to perform some action in the real world, and there's a lot of room for automation. Think of the challenges that Airbnb, JIRA/Asana, Uber/Uber Eats, and Amazon Warehouses face... this is the scope of problems you might find yourself working on.

      Cons

      Sonder has a really high employee churn rate. When I joined, almost every engineer I talked to has been with the company for less than a year. Initially, I wrote this off to the rapid hiring you often see in growth-stage start ups. However, as time passed, I noticed a trend: the people departing were the folks that had the most experience, passion, and leadership potential. In other words, Sonder was bleeding talent. There were many reasons for this, but I'll cover a few really glaring ones here. The first reason is the senior leadership, starting with the CEO, Francis. While he clearly cares a lot about the *business* side of the company, he has a distinct lack of empathy for the people that work for him. Do not expect to meet him in person for months after you join, or to have him celebrate your team's accomplishments. Chances are, he won't even be aware of what your team is working on, beyond a small set of metrics and some weekly bullet point briefs. The same is true for most of senior leadership at the company. This lack of communication permeates everything at the company. Teams have some ownership over their roadmaps, but it's not uncommon to work on a project for months, only to have it de-prioritized or abandoned once the leadership finally catches up. It can be really difficult to figure out what your team will be held accountable for, if anything (which is as much of a problem, IMO). It's no surprise, then, when most of your employees are demotivated and leave, or worse, get let go because "they failed to deliver". To drive this point home, I've heard multiple senior engineering managers talk about this-and-that employee being "ready to churn", with no inkling of empathy or regret, or intent to improve things for the person in question. And when questions like "why is the Sonder churn so high?" or "what are we doing to improve culture and retention?" come up in all hands--which they have, many, many times--the best you can hope for is confused look and a quick "this is a start-up, get used to it" response. What kind of attitude is this for supposed leaders of a company? The other reason for churn is the lack of any kind of technical direction for the company. Sonder doesn't have a CTO. There were ~150 folks and ~10 teams in the product/design/engineering org before COVID lay-offs, and there isn't a CTO. To me, this is madness, and the outcome, a predictably fragmented mess. Want to know where to spin up a new service? Take your pick from a new Heroku deployment, adding to the existing Heroku Rails monolith, AWS EC2, AWS EKS, or AWS Lambda. None of those quite "work"? Spin up something new, no one's going to stop you. Does your web application need authentication? Pick from the monolith auth endpoints that no one understands anymore and lack even the most basic features, or just roll your own using Google Auth. You'll hit that short deadline, and future you can worry about consolidating all of this user state. Are you writing a new front-end application? React is common, but you're a Rails developer and just straight up "don't like JavaScript", so why not build some turbo-link, ERB, handlebars monstrosity. Even within the React UI scope, there's a ton fragmentation between Material, Semantic, and custom UI. These are all examples of real architectural decisions that you will come across in Sonder production apps. I won't dive into tech debt, but, suffice it to say, it's bad. While every company deals with this sort of problems, you need someone at the top with a ton of technical expertise to prioritize and address these issues. If you have a technical CEO, you might be able to fill this role with a VP or a Director of engineering, but Francis is not technical. He needs someone at his level in the company to take on these problems, someone whose insights can't be dismissed as easily as a director. He needs a CTO. Last thing I'll mention is the impact of COVID on Sonder. As you probably know, there were significant layoffs. These weren't handled all that well, but, frankly, the entire situation is a mess, so I'll give the leadership a bit of a pass. As I mentioned, I left voluntarily, and my reasons were not directly related to COVID, or the layoffs. That said, the business prospects of Sonder pre-COVID and post-COVID are dramatically different. Sonder is a hospitality company, and, as such, felt the economic impact of the pandemic more than many companies. When I was interviewing in early 2019, the path to IPO, and the long-term success of the company seemed clear. Excluding large hotel chains like Marriott, Sonder had some techy competitors, but they were pretty far behind. There was also quite a bit of room in the market for both Sonder and one or two competitors to find niches. It was genuinely easy to get excited about a company with such great prospects, so I took the offer. A lot has changed since, and the path to success today seems murky. I think, if Sonder survives the next 6-12 months and outlasts most of their competitors, both of which are reasonably likely, they might come out of the pandemic in a good business position. That said, the next year for Sonder is full of uncertainty, pay cuts, possibility of further lay offs, and brutal crunch. You need a lot more grit than I to consider joining any hospitality company in this climate.

      avatar
      Sonder Response
      6y
      Thank you for sharing your feedback. It is always useful to hear different perspectives on how Sonder is doing, as we navigate the exceptional circumstances which have been presented by the Covid-19 situation. On technology consolidation or consistency, Sonder started out on Heroku and is transitioning to AWS/Kubernetes -- newer services, as you know, run in AWS/Kubernetes. The transitional state can admittedly have some areas that are messier, especially around overlap areas within the monolith. For wider breadth technology transitions, this is not unusual and the whole process usually takes longer than initially anticipated. In parallel, teams have the agency to accomplish their goals within some menu of technology choices, governed by recently established frontend and backend "guilds". In a more distributed system, the specific technologies used to build services are less important than the interactions between domains; though it is definitely helpful to establish some conventions and standards, which the guilds are meant to facilitate. The structures are there, but team leaders, like you were, have to engage and help shape it. The layoffs were obviously a very tough call, for all involved. We were one of the earlier companies to do layoffs and have since been followed by many other companies -- some of which are household names. Despite the improving situation, the Covid-19 situation will present ongoing difficulties for businesses across many sectors. On the topic of individuals mentioned who were likely to "churn", there were one-on-one discussions to explore opportunities on other teams where they might get a fresh start; or to explore passions and perhaps better role fits. These discussions were of course not communicated to the broader team since they are very individual and private to each person. In the context of potential layoffs, the question is do you retain somebody who seems chronically dissatisfied or try to give that spot to somebody who is more likely to stay? These are not easy choices. There was much more time invested here -- even before the possibility of layoffs -- than might be immediately apparent. As for Sonder's longer-term prospects, they will align with the recovery of travel. As lockdowns ease, early indications are positive; humans are after all very social creatures. As you mentioned, there are some great, smart, hardworking people here. The mixed blessing here is that the Covid-19 crisis has actually sharpened our collective focus, which is probably a good push; our competitors have also gone or been weakened. Each person will have to assess for themselves, but it seems likely that there will be a very bright light at the end of the tunnel.
      2.0
      8 Jul 2020

      I feel it is extremely important to make sure my voice is heard.

      Guest experience specialist
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business outlook

      Pros

      I am grateful for the experience and the amazing people I connected with along the way.

      Cons

      Cons are all listed below.

      avatar
      Sonder Response
      5y
      We are saddened to hear your views of your experience with Sonder, and we are working hard to alleviate some of the key concerns you cite, such as our extended guest wait times. We do have to provide some different context to some of your points. While making the decision to do a reduction of our workforce and to hours was an incredibly difficult one, it was a necessity to the business and had to be handled quickly. We know this has been an incredibly tough time for our employees, especially those on the front lines in guest facing roles, and appreciate all you and your colleagues do/have done to support our guests during this time. The change in our messaging platform had been in the works since 2019, and it’s original launch was scheduled for March. We delayed as long as we could in hopes we could launch when we’re back in the office, but we had to decide to keep advancing -- future iterations of our new platform will unlock really amazing things for our people and our guests. It will also improve the scheduling for our teams. We also do give priority to our existing team members for shifts as they become available, but still have to meet the demands of our guests. We have brought hours back to normal and increased our hiring dramatically to alleviate stress on our existing workforce and allow more senior folks more schedule preferences. One of the things we strive for in every market we enter is that we are good neighbors, and contribute to the growth and success of the communities we are in. One great example is when Sonder contributed over $100k worth of furniture to help refurbish living spaces in the city of Vancouver’s non-market housing program. In other examples, Sonder’s commitment to real estate developments has stabilized financial prospects to ensure buildings are built, and that they have affordable housing included. Those buildings wouldn’t exist without Sonder. We’re very proud to be able to do so much to support our communities, even as we try to become a profitable, self-sustaining business. If you’d care to share anything more, please reach out to our People Partners at peoplepartners@sonder.com.
      2.0
      12 Sept 2019

      Interview Tips & Culture insight at Sonder HQ

      Engineering
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business outlook

      Pros

      Work at Sonder HQ is perfect for people with a very particular mindset. It's rare that a single word can perfectly capture the complex mission of a silicon valley company. Sonder has such a word: _"Greed."_ I don't mean that in a small way. This is a machine optimized to grow as fast as we can, eat the world, and IPO. My experience is that Sonder thinks it is playing a zero sum game with Marriot and AirBnb. They will gentrify, disrupt, and step on the heads of whatever community, company, or politician tries to oppose them, because of a fiduciary duty to every Sonder shareholder. They boast deep pockets, intense focus and an army of relentless litigators. We can officially stop making fun of Silicon Valley for its corny spin on "making the world a better place." This company doesn't even pretend. It is the anti-intellectual antithesis to something like Alphabet's moonshot division. Maybe you're about to head in for an on site interview and you want to know if this is a good place to spend 10-12 hours per day 5-6 days a week. Ask every interviewer the following questions: Question 1: Why do you get up in the morning? I'd wager, the number one reason is three letters: I P O. Secondary reasons might include: - I want to buy a house in San Francisco. (even as the business model drives up prices and displaces lower paid Sonder "city team" employees). - I used to work for a ride share company that was an endless party before a new CEO was hired, this is like the old days. It's likely that: Nobody talks about solving problems that only Sonder can solve. Nobody talks about doing the most important work of their lives. Nobody talks about building better, more efficient cities. They don't even agree that customer facing technology can be a real differentiator when up against entrenched competition. Question 2: What metaphor describes your corporate culture? Some companies think of themselves as a pro sports team, or a family, or seal team six. When new skills are needed, do you develop people, or bench them? See if you get a satisfactory answer from each person, or if they look quizzically at you. Maybe they instead of answering the question they'll say, "Well, we get catered lunch every day." Question 3: How long have you worked here? Seriously, ask everyone you meet at Sonder. See if you have an experience like this: Recruiter: Less than a week Hiring Manager: Less than 2 months. Lead Engineer: Barely 1 year. Most Engineers: Weeks or months, with a couple almost nearing their last cliff, but not quite. The average tenure seems way less than the vesting schedule. They might chalk it up to growing pains, but search LinkedIn for previous leadership, and maybe offer to buy a previous manager lunch if you want to do your diligence. Question 4: What's the pay scale? If profit is your personal motive, probably you're in luck. My experience is that they will try to compete with the big 5, and salaries near 300K are on the table. Seriously tho, don't miss a sprint deadline. Question 5: The tech stack is a little old school, why did you choose it? Maybe the answer you get is something like "Dunno, I started last month." Maybe it is: "Cause the founders used Ruby in college once." I encourage you to probe and see if you can dig up technical line of reasoning that makes sense for you, especially around the persistence layer. You might even get brownie points for asking why they eschew modern data stores and streaming techniques for very wide tables

      Cons

      What truly stands out to me is how they regard the "city teams" in the HQ offices. I've never seen a cross section of humanity reduced to cells in a spreadsheet with such ruthless efficiency. These are employees and contractors that fix the plumbing, move the furniture, clean the units, run errands, manage the buildings, etc. These are likely the busiest, hardest working yet most dispensable people at Sonder, and many barely get paid a living wage. You can tell me that squeezing every ounce of productivity from laborers is a reality created by a 'healthy' gig economy. You can tell me that they have paths for advancement, that they could retrain by learning to code. What this experience instilled in me is a deep desire to tip every hospitality worker I see, and not be party to a system that lets people subsist on payday loans while some HQ "data scientist" builds an algorithm to squeeze a little more 'efficiency' out of them and get the unit cost down just another dollar. If the tech stack is not great, the tech vision is worse. Let's say that hacking on an aging rails monolith is super fun for you. Let's further suppose that peeling off APIs into more modern services has been on the minds of engineers for months, but never executed because of misaligned interests and shifting priorities. Finally lets then add an old slow persistence layer and nickname it "weak-sauce" That sounds a lot like normal big company stuff. But Sonder is in San Francisco. Probably your friends are working on self driving cars, drone delivery, cutting edge exciting cloud stuff, or mobile stuff. Maybe you spend a lot of time in meetings where words like marketplace and global expansion, and vertical integration float around but get cancelled due to shifting priorities. Maybe the most innovative thing from any tech team here is interfacing with a smart lock using tech invented in the 1990s. Try talking about that at parties- oh and spreadsheets! Who doesn't love Vlookups?

      avatar
      Sonder Response
      6y
      I'm sincerely sorry you didn't have a great experience with us. To address some of the comments, we agree that interviewees should ask the questions you outlined. They are good questions! Aside from that, unfortunately most of the content in this thread is factually incorrect. I'll try to address some that are true: yes, most of the tech team has a short tenure. That is a function of our growth rate. We stayed lean early on and try to continue to do so. I also agree that the tech stack is a little dated (Rails on Heroku) and we have work to do on that front. I am pretty sure that we are not the first startup to tradeoff for speed until we proved product market fit. It is something we are actively changing, now that we have a platform team in place. If you are comfortable talking to the people team to deliver actionable feedback on how we can improve, we would love to learn from you. Our people team email address is askpeopleops@sonder.com.
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