A once great place - Anonymous employee Sonos Employee Review

2.0
Dec 28, 2020
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

When I started in the early 2010s it was an awesome place that effectively showed how much it truly valued its employees. As the company grew and became a public company it has lost that. It is now a corporate machine the same as any other corporate machine but without any of the stability or security associated with that. The other employees are awesome. You get an good employee discount on a great product.

Cons

Anything to do with leadership. They frequently kill off projects and fire the team, then refill those positions with new people, start the project over, try to get the new people up to speed on said project, fire them all for running behind schedule, rinse, repeat. Ever wonder why Sonos has such a long notorious history of delayed product releases? Career Growth is defined as taking on other team's responsibilities when their people are let go. You do not actually get promoted to anything or pay compensation, but your responsibilities did grow. Speaking of compensation, their math is completely wrong. They will sell you on this idea of M90, then break out where that all comes from. You get M50. The job code they use to determine M50 is a crapshoot. It will most likely not reflect what you are expected to do in your position. You may or may not get a bonus as part of reaching M90 and you will eventually get stock grants (that underperform) but not in the year you worked. So your M90 compensation for 2020 is not fully paid to you in 2020. Thus making your 2020 compensation less than the M90 they will tell you. The prescribed means for earning a promotion is to go take over the role you want. Keep doing your job every day but also go do that other job. Eventually they will recognize it and promote you to that position. In practice what happens is that second job just becomes your current position's responsibility. You already proved you could do it with your current work load and they were getting that work out of you for free. Clearly they do not need someone to fill that role and can instead simply do away with it. In my time there they had 3 major lay off events. They call it "course correcting". That works out to an average of every 2 years where they go in and fire a large portion of the workforce in an effort to refocus their strategy because leadership has dropped the ball, crashed the plane into the mountain, run the ship ashore, pick your favorite metaphor for dazzling ineptitude. Leadership is SO bad at navigating a market in which Sonos is the clear front runner, that the company has routine layoffs. This is a shockingly frequent cadence that is devastating to morale and offers no sense of stability to the workforce. The attrition rate is much higher than other places I have worked. They simply cannot retain talent. This is due to other companies being able to easily lure people away with better compensation strategies and through offering promotions. My team was constantly losing guys to other companies that would promote them to a better position that payed more and demanded less of them. It would be foolish not to work somewhere else where you can be recognized more regularly, compensated more fairly, and have a more reasonable workload.

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CEO approval
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Pros

Great culture. People are humble.

Cons

In some teams engineers have to find projects themselves instead of waiting for roadmap which is good also but sometimes frustrating.

3.0
Jun 7, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
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Pros

Good work. Passionate people. Good product. Remote.

Cons

Some bad managers. They lost their footing resulting in lack of company vision. Struggled to find working styles that elevated the company (they wanted to grow yet operate like a start up)

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