Alarm.com reviews

3.7

63% would recommend to a friend

(476 total reviews)

Steve Trundle

71% approve of CEO

57% positive business outlook

Alarm.com has an employee rating of 3.7 out of 5 stars, based on 476 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Alarm.com employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.6 stars).

Reviews by job title

476 reviews
1.0
May 20, 2021

Would not recommend

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Most people are at least outwardly friendly. Lots of social events if that's something you're interested in. Work/life balance is fine.

Cons

The codebase is monolithic, and it desperately needs refactoring. It keeps getting worse as new developers are added who don't have much experience and don't know how to write good code, and more experienced engineers are pushed into management. In addition to the code itself being really terrible to work with, all the tools and technologies used are incredibly outdated. If you're interested in being strong in cutting edge tech, this is not the right place for you. The promotion standards are incredibly inconsistent. There is a document with expectations listed for each level of software engineering roles, but you can't expect to get a promotion even if you meet all the guidelines. A lot of the managers have been given the opportunity to manage after only having been a software engineer for 3-5 years, which ends up meaning some of the managers are really terrible at being managers. Even though these managers may be incapable of effectively managing, they still get promoted and have more people added under them as direct reports. There is a lack of effort from the company to support diversity and inclusion. There are some groups started by employees for this purpose, but I would have liked to see the company make an effort to foster a healthy environment, starting with hiring someone to focus on diversity and inclusion as their job. There is a culture within software engineering of being generally patronizing to people who disagree or are trying to learn something new. I've heard others talk about this, and I've experienced it myself on a different team, so it seems to span multiple teams. This certainly isn't true for everyone or even the majority of engineers, but there are a decent number of "brogrammers" at the company that perpetuate a culture of a lack of self-awareness and casual misogyny/racism. Most people are really nice and genuine, but the few people like this definitely ruined the culture for me.

2.0
Sep 25, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

* Nice benefits (aside from pay), comfortable office * Ability to work with a variety of technologies that improve customers' lives.

Cons

* Us vs them mentality between software teams. You will often hear comments putting down the manager and engineers of X, Y, or Z team, their code, and their products, especially on shared projects. * "Not my problem" culture where people often race to do the minimum amount of work possible and avoid taking ownership of the projects they are staffed on. This also shows up around the office as people regularly fail to clean up after themselves in common areas. * Terrible planning and project management. Lots of product specifications are poorly thought out and often incomplete before they are handed over to software engineers. Projects are often overzealous in scope and timeline. * There are often only 2-4 UX people employed at a time (when there are significantly more software engineers) and there is a high turn over rate. This means that projects push forward without a clear, thought out design, resulting in frustrating UI as project managers take on the work instead despite their lack of training in UX or experience. * As a Software Engineer your responsibility and workload varies greatly depending on which team you are on. * No clear path for advancement. Becoming as Senior Engineer on one team may have arbitrarily higher or lower requirements than another team as it is up to each manager's discretion. * Pay is not really competitive with other companies in the area.

2.0
Sep 2, 2015

Research FULLY before signing on

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

One of the first security industries internet-of-things companies with a track record of about 15 years.

Cons

New employees when hired make at least 15K a year than employees that have been here for years. The company seems to have totally and fully are onboard with desiring to be like it's former owner as it hires management from that company. These upper level hires have micro management and trust issues. The company they came from has a very low rating and has issues in it's present and past. Why these people are view as highly as they are is a mystery. The company had a very unique culture as of about 2 years ago. There are also innovation issues. Still attempting to improve antiquated solutions. If the company continue this path we will loose ground in a rapidly changing internet-of-things world. We should explore a Google car model. Be ahead of the curb. There also is no real instruction for new hires. It seems that you go to a 2 week "boot camp" afterwards you are dropped off in the ocean with no boat or life raft. If you can swim, you will live, if not the prognosis is not good. The boot camp isn't hands-on or detailed to job performed as is. At present the new hire has to spend months deciphering how things work, when if trained properly can hit the ground running or at least more prepared.

Viewing 19 - 21 of 476 Reviews

Glassdoor has 536 Alarm.com reviews submitted anonymously by Alarm.com employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Alarm.com is right for you.