Sentry (CA) Reviews

Pros

The people at the company are great The product is #1 A company with true Product Led Growth Very nice office and good to meet some people face to face again

Cons

The different business units aren't always on the same page The self-serve and enterprise software are nearly identical, making for a tough sale Self-serve brings in much more revenue than sales, seemingly resulting in sales having limited influence within the company

Pros

A lot of the ICs working here are very kind and smart people. There are no other pros.

Cons

Below market rate pay Abusive, toxic communication is the norm Leadership is unconcerned with success of the company Leadership is disconnected from reality Logical decision making is met with ridicule Having spent 10 years in Bay Area tech start ups, I have never run across a company as dysfunctional as this, truly breathtaking in the cascade of bad decisions over the last 2 years.

Pros

- A deeply ingrained culture of excellence, growth & respect that’s lived and actively protected by everyone. - An absolutely great and honest product backed by an amazingly talented Engineering team. - An uncompromising attitude towards open-source values and unrelenting focus on making lives of developer easier. - Passionate Software Engineers always up for a challenge and bubbling with ideas around how to deliver new and better features. - Individual expression is greatly appreciated and growth discussions are fostered. - Transparency and clear communication of priorities at all levels to make sure we are collectively moving in a clear direction. - An energetic & empathetic leadership team.

Cons

Delivery processes needs to get more organized & mature with the increasing scale & growth. Some of the orgs aren't as mature as those should be but that's typical startup problem.

Pros

- Socially, Sentry was amazing! I loved the open office environment that allowed people to see everyone and quickly connect with others. Happy Hours were great because they were themed and everyone participated and had a great time. The Slack "Donut Bot" made it easy to connect with other people across the company by grabbing coffee or lunch. - I had great team mates, they were smart, fun, and collaborative. We often hung out during and outside of work hours. - Sentry's product is top in it's class, there's a reason why Sentry is a Unicorn valued over $1B.

Cons

- The only thing saving Sentry is it's killer product........ - Leadership is trash. Sentry is a prime example of a startup that has a solid product but very unethical management of employees and terrible and far from transparent leadership. - WARNING: You will be fired for NO GOOD reason. It happen more often than it should. An employee asked for a reasonable raise. Fired. An employee was promoted and destroyed their quota first quarter. Fired right after. A C-LEVEL EXECUTIVE was hired, worked one week, went on an agreed vacation for one week, walked into the office first day back and packed his bags that same morning. Fairness and ethics is not a value Sentry cares about. HR is not there to support you. They are there to protect the company and their executives (their bosses). You are not considered. If you are fired, you are not given a reason by HR or your boss. They won't care or ask about your side of the story. There is no warm up to the firing. No "hey, we see you're not doing what we need you to do, so here's a performance improvement plan". You will just be cut. Because of this, those that don't fit the role of the typical Tech persona of a white dude with engineering or sales bro nature, you will not survive. Many women, Black, and other underrepresented employees left because of the toxic way Sentry operates and treats their employees. There was even an employee led "Culture Club" and "DEI Group" to help the company improve. I was in these groups. HR and executives did not care that morale was dropping even though we gave extra time out of our day to support their improvement. Stay away from them if you can. As they get bigger and become more and more of a machine, it's only going to get worst and you will be ingested and shat out like no one cares.

Pros

- The engineers, designers, and technical leaders at Sentry are among the best in the industry; you can see from the open-source project work and the user experience of the product itself. If you want to learn from the best, this is the place to do it. - The company culture values inclusivity and learning; the management team makes every effort to be honest about the challenges the company faces and creates opportunities for individuals to grow within their careers. -

Cons

- This is a startup that has grown quickly from its roots as an open-source project. As the team has grown so quickly, the company is still learning to plan, communicate, and operate as a 100+ person organization. This is typical, but it means that certain aspects of the company are under-developed relative to the size of the company. - There are more engineering / product / design initiatives underway than there are employees in engineering, product, and design. The wide surface area means there is a lot of trust in individuals to deliver, and there's also just a lot of pieces all moving at once.

Pros

- This is a company for developers... and the having an opportunity to work on a product that has had so much impact has been one of my best experiences - Across all roles, you will always have the opportunity to work on interesting and highly visible projects. The cross functional collaboration that is enabled by the company culture is very evident - I don’t say this often, but the leadership team is extremely impressive; from a combination of strong engineering leaders, CFO, and CEO; the company has balanced supporting and building an impressive team while making strategic decisions that have always benefited the company & team

Cons

Not necessarily a con, but your career progression and path at Sentry are in your hands. There is so much potential to grow at this company, but folks tend to forget that your biggest advocate is yourself.

Pros

I didn’t check the word count limit for this textbox but if this is where I enter all the positives, uncork your wines as I test that limit ;-) It's easy to see how Sentry is a rather complex service - especially because of the breadth of platforms it caters to - so I was filled with self-doubt that how did I make it here. It was only later when I learnt of Sentry's Culture-Add Vs Culture Fit approach, I understood that in spite of all the power to wield, they’ve made a deliberate choice to yield. This broadened and accepting mindset, allowing for different perspectives and backgrounds to collate is at the heart of what makes them so endearing for me to take time to write this up. -- Innocence, yes, it is a thing, and we all knew what it was, how much joy it was until it just got lost with time. Innocence, of course not as a virtue of being novice, but because of what is simply the right thing to do. I had more people, senior managers, peers, folks from cross functional teams, introducing themselves personally over Slack than the cumulative cliched "welcome aboard" Reply-Alls in my new hire welcome email. And this innocence fully spills over in the work ethics, where people don’t do something to simply green check a metric but work on things the hard way, making their way through the so-called boring work, so the customer’s life doesn’t have to be hard. -- Transparency: There are multiple avenues to be in the know and also to share the various milestones that either individuals or a group are achieving and progressing towards. I never have to feel that I don’t have a way to show(off) or share my work, not only to my group but to the entire company! And never do I feel that I am not in the know as if something just happened behind my back (even in a different group all-together.) -- Trust: Remember when they said Trust is earned and not given. Well, they lied. At Sentry, Trust is given, at least that has been my experience. By allowing me unparalleled flexibility as I ramped up and also being available at my whims, my manager made it easy to love my job and as a result become (hopefully) good at it. Further up the chain, my Director and my CEO in whatever meetings I've had with them, have always looked up to me for doing and leading as opposed to handing down memos and lists. -- Growth: It takes less than 5 minutes to try out Sentry’s Software as a Service and know for yourself how its on its way to be a grand slam home run. But if that's not enough, or you're not an engineer, simply put that at the backdrop of knowing that the CTO/Cofounder transitioned out of the CEO role to solely focus in shaping the Technical side of things and brought in a new CEO earlier this year for growing the company, the business, the brand and of course customers! Add to this, the continued hiring across all roles and levels amidst a global pandemic and you have a company that wouldn't necessarily appear through the search filters in your LinkedIns, Indeeds and Glassdoors! -- Ah, just remembered, Sentry has generous dollar to dollar matching for an extremely large list of non-profits, allows time off to vote and also to simply volunteer for your causes/organizations to getting us to a fair and equitable community.

Cons

Not sure if its truly amongst the cons or me being a know-it-all, but I do have something in the "advice for management"

Pros

The people at Sentry are a really big draw. There's a great, close, community of folks that genuinely care about one another. It was very easy to feel at home, very quickly. Something I miss now. The product is super solid. I'm very confident in the future of Sentry, from a product/business perspective. What I worked on was interesting and challenging. I had lots of opportunity to define the direction I wanted to take things and see that through. There's a good amount of freedom given to people to pursue the ideas they have. I was personally very well supported by my boss. I always felt like I had someone to go to, who'd give me honest feedback and help when needed. The level of guidance was just right – not too heavy-handed, but also not completely hands off.

Cons

Lack of more formalized/evangelized mentorship. It didn't feel like there was a support system for more junior engineers to really be successful. It depended greatly on who you happened to end up working with. Communication became harder and harder. I think this is partially due to the size the company became and a function of how fast it grew. It's pretty normal at their size for communication to become an issue, but it was still frustrating not knowing what was going on elsewhere in the company.