Samsara reviews

4.0

75% would recommend to a friend

(1,409 total reviews)
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Sanjit Biswas

90% approve of CEO

72% positive business outlook

Samsara has an employee rating of 4.0 out of 5 stars, based on 1,409 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Samsara 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

1K reviews
1.0
Aug 13, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

They give you a nice laptop but what tech company doesn't?

Cons

The Samsara sales work culture is extremely toxic and racist. You will thrive if you are blonde, white, and come from money. Directors and managers play favorites, and opportunities/recognition is only given to white coworkers. Usually, sales is performance based and everyone is on an equal playing field, however I saw mediocre white employees get promoted faster than the higher performing poc counterparts only because the director favored them more. Samsara is very performative, they made an announcement that they recognized they needed to hire more diverse salespeople during the BLM movement, but guess who they hired after that announcement? All white people. As everyone knows, sales is always a grind, however Samsara takes sink or swim quite literally. PIPs are handed out freely, so there is zero job security. Hitting quota is doing the bare minimum, so get ready to be looked down upon by your manager if you happen to have a "bad" month. This creates a hyper competitive environment, very cut throat. Management only hires people that know how to sell because they will provide zero training. You MUST figure it out on your own. They rely on the success of the company because the product is better than competitors, but have fun trying to get actual constructive feedback by your managers. Samsara sales leaders expects their employees to fall in line with no questions asked. Their word is law and do not care about making improvements. Be careful when filling out those "anonymous" quarterly reviews! Managers will conspire with their team leads to figure out who on the team put in negative feedback. Management is lazy and wants to continue working as they always have. I do not approve of the CEO, it's almost as if he turns a blind eye with how the sales org is run. Do better.

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Samsara Response
4y
Thank you for taking the time to share your experience. Your willingness to share feedback is what helps make Samsara such a great place to learn and grow. In regards to diversity, we understand we have a lot of work to do when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Over the last year, we focused on our DEI efforts: We set a target to have 40% underrepresented groups* at the Manager Phone Screen stage of the interview process across all roles and management levels. We finished FY21 at 39.52%. In 6 months, we trained 57.4% of our staff in the principles and practices of building inclusive culture. Our goal is to get to 100%. We expanded our DEI Steering Committee - a group of leaders across Samsara representative of various demographics, departments, and positions that work to set strategy in all aspects of company involvement. And we will continue to do more. We recently published our first DEI Annual Report for FY21 to share some of the progress we’ve made and to hold ourselves accountable to the big goals we have over the next few years. You can find it on samsara.com/diversity. Regarding Sales culture and performance: One feature of Samsara’s high-performing sales culture is that there are consistent targets for Sales employees. Failure to meet our sales goals directly impacts our growth as a company. As a part of our process, and to ensure accountability, we clearly communicate the performance improvement policies regularly and set realistic targets on a quarterly basis. The performance improvement process has been modified to allow for a space to persevere through adversity, with more refined coaching and targeted skills development, guided by Sales leadership. Your feedback is important - our Sales and People Ops leadership teams are always open toideas on how we can communicate these goals or improve our processes.
1.0
Jul 4, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Perhaps there's a few dollars to be made at IPO (if it ever happens, they keep kicking that can down the road), IF and only if you got equity in early rounds. Sorry newcomers!

Cons

When a company has a generally terrible rating/comments, and all of the positive comments are short one-liners with 5 stars (submitted by company to skew the result and improve recruiting), this should be a giant red flag. You'll see a recurring theme here - middle management is terrible. Big ego's, major sense of 'old guard' here, very cliquey. Prepare for the most irrational decision making you've ever seen - it will truly blow your mind. NOT just sales here is miserable, morale is terrible across engineering and ops as well. Everyone is stagnant here. Mass exodus looming post-IPO.

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Samsara Response
4y
Thank you for taking the time to share about your experience. Leadership development is a focus area for the people team this year. In addition to the foundational manager training we offer through LifeLabs to all of our managers, we have recently implemented a mandatory 6-month leadership principles training course led by our CEO. We also have all our managers attend inclusion training. If you have any suggestions on how we can improve in this area or have additional feedback, feel free to reach out to your People Partner or People team directly.
2.0
Feb 26, 2021

Rampant favoritism and lip service to diversity

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Opportunity to do high impact work

Cons

- Favoritism is the name of the game at Samsara, if you look like people at the top and are liked by them you can get ahead - Lip service to diversity, in the time I was there the excuse of "talent pipeline" was always the reason for subpar representation across everything - Boys club culture all around, sexist in some instances I know everyone keeps pointing to the layoffs as the turning point in Samsara's sh1tty culture, but the issues were there all along. People were just too enamored by free lunches and busy drinking the koolaid to see it. Beware of the positive reviews, I would bet anything they're coming from the people that benefit from the very culture that rewards the fratty clique-y attitude.

Viewing 55 - 57 of 1,409 Reviews

Glassdoor has 1,603 Samsara reviews submitted anonymously by Samsara employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Samsara is right for you.