Pros
The sdr job is extremely demanding and will sometimes (or even quite often) make you hate your life but if you’re truly good at this job (which only about 35-50% of people actually are) you will ultimately find it rewarding and enjoyable. Fortunately I’ve been one of them. Free lunches everyday make the job worth it. Teams will often go out for dinner/drinks and there’s usually an in office happy hour + catered dinner once a quarter which is nice. I’ve made some great close friends here - everyone is young, fun, smart, and motivated. If you consistently over-attain on quota and source a few big closed-won deals you can also make really good money this early in your career. Navan also spends a lot of time and effort into developing and training sdrs including an all expenses paid bootcamp in one of the global offices each month for new joiners.
Cons
Put simply the sdr leadership is not great. They are constantly putting pressure on managers which trickles down to sdrs themselves instead of addressing the root cause which is that many of the AEs at the company are horrible to work with. And it’s not necessarily the AEs faults either. For some reason the company puts tons of pressure on them to self-source deals which leads to them flat out stealing meetings right from underneath sdrs. This has happened countless times to everyone I know and almost makes the job unbearable. Why even have an sdr team if you consistently allow AEs to book meetings on top of them that they objectively do not deserve?? However my biggest gripe with the company is the promotion path. Virtually every quarter they change a huge thing that either negatively or positively impacts a large swath of the org. Mid last year they made it 1000x harder to be promoted to senior, and while I agree it was too easy to begin with, it’s now absurdly difficult. Since they only promote on a quarterly basis (which makes no sense if going to senior) you might have to wait several months longer than other peers, even if you’ve been outperforming them for longer. I’ve seen several sdrs who are extremely good get held back over multiple quarters on the basis of a single sqo (which has zero financial impact to the business compared to CW ER which is far more valuable). What’s even worse is that many sdrs play the politics of their ae<>sdr partnership to a degree that allows them to succeed and get promoted multiple times over without even being good at their job.