Working at Sonos in Cambridge, MA: 4 Employee Job Reviews by Real Employee working in Cambridge, MA Area

"Sonos employee in the 20102012 timeframe. The workplace environment went steadily down, in large part due to middle management ignoring risk reported to them and unrealistically compressing schedules risking overall quality. Made a poorly thought-out Agile/Scrum process change that didn't adequately take into account the multiple points of intersection of Sonos' hardware, firmware, software plus support for OS X, iOS handset, iPad, Android handset, tablet, Kindle & Win leading to loss of focus."

"Great engineers, but management needs help"

What do you like about working at Sonos?

"The Sonos system is great concept and the Software and Hardware Engineers are all wicked smart and work extremely hard to put out a great product that everyone involved with can be proud of."

Do you have any tips for others interviewing with this company?

"Expect to be overworked, the interview process is grueling and one dislike by an interviewer will sink an applicant's chances. Behavioral questions are popular during the interview process."

What don't you like about working at Sonos?

"There is 100% crunch time. There is no slip built into schedules that inevitably will slip and this causes products to overlap in development and testing. Resource shortfalls are met with a deaf ear. There is no time to grow either personally, or organizationally because every member of teams are constantly working to simply get the products out."

What suggestions do you have for management?

"The company is in transition from being a small startup where everyone was aware what everyone was working on to one where the number of products and revisions were simply too many concurrent products to keep track of all features and documentation with specs and other documents going into a black hole of a Sharepoint server and there is no comprehensive set of specs, just a series of commutative wireframes stored in different locations. It is easier to fix a design issue before code has been written and dependencies have already been made against it. Weed out the middle management who are constantly coming up with new process paradigms to cover up their own ineffectual management styles. The company is better than that and deserves visionary management that can lead with an overarching goal in mind and a way to get there that is co-opted from industry leading visionary companies that successfully manage both hardware and software schedules and not what is currently in place."