Tons of potential, held back by poor leadership - Senior Software Engineer/Engineering Manager Sonder Employee Review

Sonder has a really high employee churn rate. When I joined, almost every engineer I talked to has been with the company for less than a year. Initially, I wrote this off to the rapid hiring you often see in growth-stage start ups. However, as time passed, I noticed a trend: the people departing were the folks that had the most experience, passion, and leadership potential. In other words, Sonder was bleeding talent. There were many reasons for this, but I'll cover a few really glaring ones here. The first reason is the senior leadership, starting with the CEO, Francis. While he clearly cares a lot about the *business* side of the company, he has a distinct lack of empathy for the people that work for him. Do not expect to meet him in person for months after you join, or to have him celebrate your team's accomplishments. Chances are, he won't even be aware of what your team is working on, beyond a small set of metrics and some weekly bullet point briefs. The same is true for most of senior leadership at the company. This lack of communication permeates everything at the company. Teams have some ownership over their roadmaps, but it's not uncommon to work on a project for months, only to have it de-prioritized or abandoned once the leadership finally catches up. It can be really difficult to figure out what your team will be held accountable for, if anything (which is as much of a problem, IMO). It's no surprise, then, when most of your employees are demotivated and leave, or worse, get let go because "they failed to deliver". To drive this point home, I've heard multiple senior engineering managers talk about this-and-that employee being "ready to churn", with no inkling of empathy or regret, or intent to improve things for the person in question. And when questions like "why is the Sonder churn so high?" or "what are we doing to improve culture and retention?" come up in all hands--which they have, many, many times--the best you can hope for is confused look and a quick "this is a start-up, get used to it" response. What kind of attitude is this for supposed leaders of a company? The other reason for churn is the lack of any kind of technical direction for the company. Sonder doesn't have a CTO. There were ~150 folks and ~10 teams in the product/design/engineering org before COVID lay-offs, and there isn't a CTO. To me, this is madness, and the outcome, a predictably fragmented mess. Want to know where to spin up a new service? Take your pick from a new Heroku deployment, adding to the existing Heroku Rails monolith, AWS EC2, AWS EKS, or AWS Lambda. None of those quite "work"? Spin up something new, no one's going to stop you. Does your web application need authentication? Pick from the monolith auth endpoints that no one understands anymore and lack even the most basic features, or just roll your own using Google Auth. You'll hit that short deadline, and future you can worry about consolidating all of this user state. Are you writing a new front-end application? React is common, but you're a Rails developer and just straight up "don't like JavaScript", so why not build some turbo-link, ERB, handlebars monstrosity. Even within the React UI scope, there's a ton fragmentation between Material, Semantic, and custom UI. These are all examples of real architectural decisions that you will come across in Sonder production apps. I won't dive into tech debt, but, suffice it to say, it's bad. While every company deals with this sort of problems, you need someone at the top with a ton of technical expertise to prioritize and address these issues. If you have a technical CEO, you might be able to fill this role with a VP or a Director of engineering, but Francis is not technical. He needs someone at his level in the company to take on these problems, someone whose insights can't be dismissed as easily as a director. He needs a CTO. Last thing I'll mention is the impact of COVID on Sonder. As you probably know, there were significant layoffs. These weren't handled all that well, but, frankly, the entire situation is a mess, so I'll give the leadership a bit of a pass. As I mentioned, I left voluntarily, and my reasons were not directly related to COVID, or the layoffs. That said, the business prospects of Sonder pre-COVID and post-COVID are dramatically different. Sonder is a hospitality company, and, as such, felt the economic impact of the pandemic more than many companies. When I was interviewing in early 2019, the path to IPO, and the long-term success of the company seemed clear. Excluding large hotel chains like Marriott, Sonder had some techy competitors, but they were pretty far behind. There was also quite a bit of room in the market for both Sonder and one or two competitors to find niches. It was genuinely easy to get excited about a company with such great prospects, so I took the offer. A lot has changed since, and the path to success today seems murky. I think, if Sonder survives the next 6-12 months and outlasts most of their competitors, both of which are reasonably likely, they might come out of the pandemic in a good business position. That said, the next year for Sonder is full of uncertainty, pay cuts, possibility of further lay offs, and brutal crunch. You need a lot more grit than I to consider joining any hospitality company in this climate.