Mixed Feelings - Software Engineer II Alarm.com Employee Review

3.0
Apr 30, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

-Great work-life balance, very few hard deadlines to meet and not a place that wants you to grind. Most of the time just working a typical 40 hours is enough -Good culture and people, there's some really cool individuals you can meet there, and I made some actual friends -I actually enjoyed working in the office for the above reasons

Cons

-A lot of engineers end up being in silos (so they're the only engineer) for their projects. This ends up being rough for everyone since you end up pretty isolated in terms of work, and there's only person who has any expertise with their project. So if you need to find information, you might end up needing to spend a lot of time asking questions across teams to find the one person that actually has an answer to the questions you have. And if they've left you're gonna have to hope there's thorough documentation somewhere. A lot of projects thus have a low bus factor. -Despite being silo'd on my own project, I found myself juggling other projects and responsibilities at times, which make it hard to focus on one task because of all the context switching. -Tech debt. There's stuff that's been really tightly coupled together that shouldn't be and doesn't follow SOLID principles which makes it really difficult to work with sometimes, most people just end up working around it because there's always a push to put engineers on the never ending flow of new projects. -Attrition and turnover. While some people do stick around, I saw a lot of people leave before/around the 2 year mark, which lead to only a few people with 4+ years of experience sticking around, and ends up contributing to the lower bus factor. -Promotions seem more tenure based than performance based. Overall I wasn't bothered by this, but I know others did care. -I would say that Alarm's good about job security, but there were layoffs during the pandemic.

Explore other reviews about Alarm.com

5.0
Jun 9, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Nice office space good environment

Cons

Expensive area for finding housing

3.0
Jun 19, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Company culture - the people are great. Decent benefits for a single person Interesting products and projects Work from home flexibility (2 days)

Cons

Compensation could be more competitive for the area. Unfortunately, they are taking advantage of the employer market right now, and offering salaries 6k less than what starting salaries the year prior was offered. Your manager definitely has the biggest impact on your time here, with little regulation or management above them. It will entirely shape your experience, for better or for worse. Decreased work from home flexibility - when I accepted the offer, my recruiter told me it was typical for employees to work from home around the November and December holidays, with no need to take all your vacation days to do so. At the last minute, this norm was mysteriously taken away, and depending on your manager, employees were told to either use their vacation days or be in the office the day before and after Xmas. Cozy. The AI strategy here is starting to finally look like an actual strategy, but before that it was in every sense of the world a mania and definitely shifted the culture in a bad way. Kudos to the people who attempted to take leadership and actually formulate our strategy. HR here is kind of useless, the team is extremely bloated. Onboarding was not a fun experience.

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