Sub-par Engineering Culture, but solid money-making product - Software Engineer Samsara Employee Review

2.0
Apr 7, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Smart tech (although open to some infringement claims right now) - Hard-working people - A mature product that sells well in marketplace. Stock price will likely continue to rise. - Solid office in SF. - Some teams still working on new and interesting product lines, e.g. ML. - Established name in tech, so helpful on resume for future roles. - Chance to work at large customer scale.

Cons

- Inexperienced people in wrong places making bad decisions. - Serious accumulation of tech debt. - In "sales stage" of Silicon Valley lifecycle, really trying to push up revenue and focus on sales instead of engineering innovation. - Poor culture of accountability, leaders get poor visibility into problems and problems get pushed onto the engineers. - Bad engineering attrition, leaving new engineers to figure out what's what with little support. - Sub-par documentation, really hurts new engineer onboarding. - Office was pretty dead. - On-call culture (depending on team) was flat-out miserable.

Explore other reviews about Samsara

5.0
Jul 3, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

People, growth opportunities, work-life balance

Cons

Fast-paced environment can be a lot to keep up with at times, AI-fatigue

2.0
Jul 9, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Innovative product, constantly growing the platform

Cons

Compensation doesn’t feel competitive for the workload and expectations of the role. Frequent annual changes—including territory realignments, account books, verticalization, and quota adjustments—create unnecessary disruption and make it difficult to build long-term customer relationships and pipeline. The company has grown rapidly, but account distribution hasn’t always kept pace with headcount, leaving many reps competing for limited opportunity and making OTE difficult to achieve consistently. The Team Lead role is one of the biggest pain points. Team Leads are expected to operate like frontline managers without the compensation or authority that comes with a management position. They carry a fully ramped quota while also traveling, mentoring new hires, leading office hours, answering rep questions, supporting onboarding, and taking on enablement responsibilities. While these leadership opportunities can be rewarding, they often come at the expense of selling time and make it significantly harder to hit quota.

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