Pros
My experience with Sequoia started out great. They do hire awesome people who are intelligent, thoughtful, and generally pleasant.
Cons
Where do I begin? What started as a place that seemed too good to be true proved to be just that. Too good to be true. The company used to have a flexible remote policy and has spent years trying to pivot into the comp benchmarking space. The entire time I worked there I noticed my work life balance constantly being eroded by their push to get my team to have clients use half baked products they never asked for, all while technological features integral to their core business suffered. The role of people on my team was constantly expanded without any adjustment to our compensation, and they’d try to gloss over the steady, continuous erosion of the working conditions with corporate kool aid drinking sessions where they’d apply mass peer pressure to discourage any dissent or valid criticism voiced by employees. Sequoia used to have a supportive, inclusive culture and in the span of 2 years after I got hired things shifted. Once they hired the new CEO on the PEO side of things, the changes I’ve referenced accelerated even faster. I’d say the place is like a mirage. Looks good from the outside going in, but once you’re in it you see a lot simply isn’t what it’s cracked up to be and the facade has been harder to keep up as out of touch upper management and senior leaders have permanently damaged what was always the secret sauce that made Sequoia a great place to work initially : its work culture. I guess I can’t say I’m surprised. There’s also a very strong cliquey nature to sequoia. You will never get promoted if you’re not someone that upper management likes, and over the last 18 months their leadership seems to be intentionally destroying the old guard as they hyper corporatize everything. They indiscriminately fire leaders and employees people like working with to push in person work, and seemingly to axe high salaries. The company preaches things like pay transparency and doesn’t practice what they preach; they're incredibly opaque about their own pay and I routinely saw people get under compensated for the same position. They seem to have destroyed their remote work culture to focus on lowering pay bands in lower cost of living areas while increasing work loads. I’d avoid working here if you want a good work life balance or want a place where you have job security and transparency from leadership. They’re incompetent and intent on pushing initiatives clients don’t even want instead of improving on areas they’ve clearly expressed frustration over.
