Sonos reviews

3.6

59% would recommend to a friend

(440 total reviews)

Tom Conrad

47% approve of CEO

38% positive business outlook

Sonos has an employee rating of 3.6 out of 5 stars, based on 440 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Sonos employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Manufacturing industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

440 reviews
2.0
Dec 28, 2020

A once great place

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.

4.0
Mar 16, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

First of all: I have great love for the people of Sonos and the products we make. I use them in my home daily and see the value in what we do each day. I personally love the culture at Sonos. It's fairly laid back, no expectation to work late or work weekends (although sometimes some of us do, just for yucks and because the weather in Boston sucks 5 months out of the year), just get your stuff done and go home. But people do work hard. Work from home is allowed, but like anywhere else, you will not be on the same footing as people coming into the office every day. Pay is great, I have a lot of freedom to explore new technologies and processes, and I have learned a tremendous amount. I have worked with some seriously whip-smart folks. It's also the first place in my life where I felt like it was OK to be me.

Cons

Too many people waiting to cash out on stock options who are kind of 'retired on the job' which can be incredibly frustrating to deal with. I blame Sonos for overpromising years ago on Stock options, but the level of overpromise pales in comparison to the start-up world, so it's not an abnormal situation. That being said, cash compensation is more than adequate. While I have learned a ton, I'm getting to the point where I feel like I'm outgrowing my role, but there's not really a place for me to move up (or out, or sideways) to. Then again, the mostly flat structure has made it so that nobody is backstabbing each other for middle management roles, which is a good thing. I hate working in an open office, but that ship has sailed long ago. You might wonder why so many folks work from home, well, there's your answer. Lighting is abyssmal, and engineers who sit near natural light seem to have all the control over lighting. It would be great to have a lighting expert come in and make some scientific decisions instead of a battle of engineers choosing how dark to make it because of how hypersensitive their nervous systems can get. Employees should not battle for lighting. Noise is also a problem. Overhead maskers help, but there's no real enforcement of having meetings (or phone calls) not out in the open. How the heck am I supposed to debug a seriously hard systems problem when impromptu meetings happen in open air? Paying software engineers more will not make these environmental problems go away and (surprise!) not magically make them more effective engineers. Environment is important, especially for work which requires up to 10 hours a day (only before a big milestone) of deep, sustained concentration. All in all, these are petty concerns. At the end of the day Sonos has granted me a lot of tangible and intangible benefits, and I am truly grateful for that.

Viewing 7 - 9 of 440 Reviews

Glassdoor has 532 Sonos reviews submitted anonymously by Sonos employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Sonos is right for you.