Do not move from far away to work here. - Sales Engineer Sweetwater Employee Review

Thanks for your thoughts and for having been a part of our team. I always appreciate the honest feedback. I'm glad to see the list of pros but I'm obviously sad to see the list of cons. Some things you share are partially accurate but perhaps lack some context so I'd like to fill that in a bit for anyone reading. 1) PTO and holidays - we're very upfront about our PTO levels with all incoming employees and holidays for sales engineers. PTOs grow with tenure like with many other companies and we're continually benchmarking our levels against other great companies. On holidays, we're very clear for SEs that we're in ecommerce/retail so taking off the biggest retail days of the year is certainly tough. We get that many people would like to cut out on the day after Thanksgiving but if we let that happen, then we'd be leaving thousands of our loyal customers high and dry. Obviously, this expectation looks a bit different for some employees that aren't on the front line with customers or involved in getting their orders out the door. 2) Pay - we do have a minimum in place to help support SEs who aren't performing well enough to earn sufficient commission. The vast, vast majority of SEs never descend down to this minimum though and many are making high 5 figures or more within just a couple of years or less of rolling out. But, it is commission sales - so the better you do, the more you make - and it's uncapped so the sky is the limit. It's really cool for me to see the feedback from SEs and their families who are buying new cars, first houses, and taking fun vacations way earlier than they ever thought they could. 3) Female representation - Across Sweetwater, we hired 346 females last year. 75 females earned promotions. We still have more work to do on the sales floor for sure but, as I've shared in some other posts, the challenge with these positions isn't unique to Sweetwater - it's unfortunately industry-wide. That's why we're huge supporters and active partners with organizations like Women's Audio Mission, Beats by Girlz, NAMM's Smart Women in Music initiative, and others. We're working hard on this issue. We're putting real money and time into it. Our 2 lead sales engineer recruiters are both females and they are focused on this as well. Also, I'm not sure exactly when you left us, but last year we hired 20 females onto the sales floor - our highest level ever. 4) Sorry, your statement on the community spread of covid just isn't accurate (regardless of perception). Throughout the pandemic, we had our own in-house medical team doing detailed contact tracing (way more than most other companies could) and had a good handle on the covid dynamics. Obviously, we couldn't share all the sensitive personal medical info with employees but we were very close to this. I understand the desire for WFH (which we did allow for a period), but through our tracking we also knew every step of the way how our approach was working. The pandemic has of course been incredibly difficult and I know hard on everyone - but we have lots of people across our team who deeply care about their coworkers and who put thousands of hours into cleaning, sanitizing, tracking, communicating, and the many other steps we took around covid. Advice to Management) At the VP level and above we have multiple people who are 30s/40s/females/people of color. Our SVP and General Counsel is female. Our VP of Employee Wellbeing is female. Our VP of Corporate Communications is female. Our VP of Sales Administration is female. We're not settling for the status quo and we're actively pursuing opportunities for continuous improvement in this area but I'm also very proud of the diverse set of leaders that are helping guide Sweetwater every day. Again, thanks for the feedback. We do take it seriously (just like the feedback that we also receive in exit interviews) and use it to get better. If you'd ever like to reach out and talk directly, feel free. I'd welcome the conversation and your additional perspectives. - Jeff Ostermann, Chief People Officer