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soona

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soona reviews

2.2

17% would recommend to a friend

(45 total reviews)

10% positive business outlook

Ratings by category

2.8

Diversity & inclusion

2.3

Culture & values

2.3

Work/Life balance

2.3

Compensation and benefits

2.0

Career opportunities

1.8

Senior management

soona has an employee rating of 2.2 out of 5 stars, based on 45 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an average working experience there. The soona employee rating is 43% below average for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Ratings by demographic groups

Reviews by job title

45 reviews
2.0
Sep 29, 2022

Creative Burnout and Lack of Resources

Studio creative
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Energy is high, there's joking all around, and the slack notifications are always pinging. It can be easy to connect with others across all the studios. - Getting to work with everyday models is fun and makes every shoot with pro-services (models, pets, stylists, etc) more engaging

Cons

- Creatives (photographers, assistants, etc) are expected to do tasks outside their job description on a daily basis. On paper, the studio creative is supposed to shoot up to 6 hours a day within an 8-hour shift. soona often schedules for longer than the 8 hour shift with expectation of doing pre-production outside of those hours and being available on Slack for any questions that may arise. - The average full-time, salaried studio creative makes between $50k and $55k and works an average of 50 hours a week. There are no options for overtime and there is a yearly Rally Day nearing holiday season on a Saturday where every available employee is required to work. - There is no lunch-hour built in to the schedule. While back-to-back shoots no longer happen, a creative is expected to eat between shoots amidst juggling client communication, bay cleanup and setup, and image/gallery offloading. - The work culture is tough: leadership preaches this fun, casual energy, but on the day to day, managers micro-manage. There's a lack of trust and autonomy. It's gossipy and there's a stark lack of professionalism. - There is no real onboarding structure. As a photographer, you shadow for a few shoots then you're flying solo. It can be hard to build confidence in your work when you feel the lack of training under your belt of how to be a successful creative at soona. While you're able to ask your Studio Pro or a fellow creative for help, the absence of formal onboarding and training makes it a tough learning curve.

avatar
soona Response
3y
One year ago, we hired a number of salaried employees due to growing demand from our clients. We now recognize that they needed more training than some of our more seasoned production creatives. We worked to correct this situation in 2022 and now have 6+ days of intensive training for new full-time creative crew members with stepped ramp up for the role. We also continue to update our job descriptions and interview process to ensure clarity of expectations. Professional production is a hard field that requires intense work.That’s why we continue to be open to feedback and are routinely making changes to our production roles and requirements. Throughout the entire company, those with salaried positions often work more than 8 hour days. As a startup, we do our best to be honest about this and have never intended to represent otherwise. Instead, we seek fairness. We offer creatives full-time salaried positions (and part-time hourly) with strong benefits (health, dental, vision, 401K, unlimited PTO, college debt repayment, family leave and more), monthly performance incentives and a career ladder with growth opportunities that lead to roles exceeding $90K. We are proud of the creative staff who have grown to these levels, as well as moved to new roles in other departments. soona also completes competitive marketplace analysis once per year to ensure we are within the market range for all our roles. We will continue to work hard to create a long-term business that provides more opportunities, growth, skill development and a positive place to work (and yes, work hard too) for our entire creative crew.
1.0
Sep 19, 2022

Leadership desperately needs to align (and want to be leadership)

Product manager
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Got to see cool product pictures featuring adorable puppies on the regular, the Product team itself was full of incredibly genuine, supportive people.

Cons

Senior leadership has a unique mix of problems: there are leaders that are incredibly unequipped, leaders that appear to genuinely not want the role, and leaders that are competent and talented whose voices get drowned out. It's incredibly hard to drive a company in any sort of direction, much less a successful one, when product meetings with leadership turn into ego-measuring battles with, arguably, some of the most crucial leaders remaining silent during the debate. The company follows "conscious leadership" apparently, which is something I never witnessed in action. Instead, leadership (especially within engineering and upper leadership) would often be combative, petty, or immediately pull rank -- in one instance, in a group Slack channel, I had a leader call me out despite not reading the related documentation or tickets (therefore not understanding the full situation). When I tried to express a serious concern to upper leadership, the response was that I was using the term "decision rights" incorrectly and that we would "do a workshop" and there was no regard for the actual issue I raised: that no one understood who got to actually have final say on a topic (which, per "conscious leadership" is not "decision rights"). Much of the company seems to want to have final say on a topic without wanting any of the consequences of being the decision maker; that is, something as simple as updating a line of copy would involve a chain of approvals that would rival that of a massive organization, without any clarity on who truly was the important approver. There were never moments of, "this needs to get done, I'll handle any fallout, this is the decision that is going out the door" -- a mindset that, frankly, is key for startups to grow. If tickets weren't written following the exact template (down to having headers that were bolded and in certain colors), that was a problem; it was not a problem when stakeholders bypassed product entirely and requested features from engineering, resulting in double work or work that directly interfered with each other.

avatar
soona Response
3y
We’re sorry that this was your experience, but we do appreciate your feedback. We’re a company that continues to hold diversity of voice and perspective at the forefront of all that we create together. We will use this feedback in our continued growth.
2.0
Aug 29, 2022

Mhe

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Photos all day, great studio crew

Cons

Creatives are considered factory workers at soona, low morale. Reach out to studio creatives in the city you where are applying to to make sure it isn't a sinking ship!

Viewing 34 - 36 of 45 Reviews
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Glassdoor has 51 soona reviews submitted anonymously by soona employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if soona is right for you.