senior software engineer

software engineer

quality engineer

operations associate

sales representative

Alarm.com

I worked as an SOA for a year and a half with Alarm. They absolutely require your full week days and commitment. I would recommend this job if you have absolutely nothing going on in your life besides work. The turnover rate is extremely high, I watched close to a hundred people in and out of the same position as me during my time there. 

When you start they make it appear as if it’s a fun-loving and open and easy workplace, but my experience after a few months became the exact opposite. 

It is REQUIRED that you work 9 hour shifts every single day, no variation or changes. You accrue enough PTO to take one single day off per month, so taking a week off would require about 6 months of never taking an even an hour off. 
You CANNOT call out without PTO, calling out is absolutely not allowed and WILL result in disciplinary action. I’m writing this as someone who very rarely calls out of work and the few times I had to (Once due to a family emergency that included medical care) I was met with write-ups even after carefully explaining the situation.

It is required you work in office 2 days a week even though the entirety of your job can be done at home. Wasted gas and commute time to do my same exact job in the office twice a week without any real reasoning. It’s not like there is any social interaction at the office, I went to my desk and worked and was barely greeted by anyone, everyone just comes and goes to do their job and do not socialize. 
I had basically zero work-life balance working here and missed out on a ton of things in my life. 

During your 9 hour shift you have to be on the phone (extremely high volume. You won’t have a minute to process anything) solving incredibly complex issues that they do NOT train you on. The training covers the *basics* of their product line but hardly anything at all that actually pertains to what anyone is calling tech support for. They have a knowledge base that is essentially just google for their products with very short articles and expect that to get you through extremely complex situations that are not covered in their resources. 
Their QA team records and documents all your calls and grades them and if you don’t know the answer to what they’re asking you will also be written up. Without the equipment to actually answer 75% of the questions posed on calls, this is an incredibly unrealistic expectation. 


If you spend ANY extra time doing ANYTHING but being on the phone you will be reprimanded. You have to submit a detailed report after every phone call that they give you FOUR minutes to type and submit on a separate program or you will be met with corrective action if you go over the allotted time. Some of these calls are hours long and require a TON of detail and it’s completely unrealistic to document all of it in four minutes time. 

During my time I inquired multiple times about exploring other company positions (not promotions, essentially my job with different duties I.e. chat and email support) and was always met with “Let me look into that for you!” and never followed up and management didn’t even seem to remember me inquiring. Do not work here if you’re looking for any sort of job progression or promotions or even trying anything aside from what you get hired for. 

You will be treated like a number on a spreadsheet and not a human being. I was never met with compassion besides the usual corporate fakeness and trained responses, despite it being marketed as a community and fun place to work who values their team. 

Every month they do a meeting and give out small meaningless awards (with no profit in incentive or reward besides some claps in a Teams Meeting), and I sat through many of these and they gave the awards to the same 5-10 people that get them EVERY month, who have worked there for years. But everyone aims for them despite.. no incentive and no chance to get them. 

I was given ONE hourly cost of living raise while I worked there and it was a whole 40 cents an hour. You have to consistently learn new products and areas while employed and slowly train on everything in their ecosystem, AKA more calls and more stress over time with also NO incentive. No raises and no benefits to more work and more stress, it’s just expected. 

All in all, I would not recommend the Alarm.com SOA position to a friend unless you love high-stress and little reward. 

This is the perfect place for anyone fresh out of college looking for professional experience in technology. I would not recommend this company to anyone that has had years of experience unless you have no other option. There was no room for professional growth other than tuition reimbursement. Movement within the company was typically based on favoritism and who you know. Discussions with the manager regarding salary were never productive. The manager would say that they don't know, or can't make that decision, or it's not possible to re-negotiate salary, or it all depends on how much is available during a certain quarter. HR would say the latter but add that it's managers' discretion whether you get a raise and also based on performance. Then managers would say performance evaluation doesn't matter. In the end, if you do get a bonus or raise, it's not even close to what you could receive if you left the company for a higher salary at another tech company.

I really would have liked for the HR and management team to be more transparent with employees about salary and encourage professional growth within the company. Talk openly about pay and encourage internal mentorship opportunities for people to learn about different roles within the company and hire from within. Some people would love to switch careers but cannot do this without office politics. Creating a mentorship program could help remove that restriction to explore different fields of interest and can help retain employees.

Managers shouldn't have to feel threatened by an employee when during performance discussion an employee asks about taking on responsibilities equal to or above his level for growth. Even if there isn't any management position available on the team and a high-performing employee asks about next-level roles, take it as a hint that they've outgrown the role they're in and work with them to explore positions in other departments if none is available on the current team or see if a new job title can be created within the team.

Managers, don't fear losing team members because they're your best employee, help them move on up, and keep training other peers to grow. That's what great managers should do IMO, help employees grow, not hinder and discourage because they feel their jobs are at risk.

Overall, this was a nice company and nice people to work for while I built my experience. But because of a lack of professional growth opportunities and non-competitive salary, I decided to leave.

I loved this job when I first joined. That was maybe a month. After that, they throw you into taking calls in multiple mediums: Video, Home Auto, Garage Doors, and Thermostats. This wouldn't be as big of a deal if they had a stronger focus on training but unfortunately, a month of listening to someone read off of a PowerPoint is not an efficient way to teach, in my opinion. They constantly recognized that we are "drinking from  a firehose" but their only solution was to take more calls to get more familiar. That is difficult to do when you have an angry technician on the line who wants you to resolve it as fast as possible. They also promised during training that the dealer we will be talking too are great people who make the job fun. That was by far the biggest lie told to me while working there. If I take 20 calls in one day, guaranteed 5 angry dealers who call in to tell  you how awful alarm.com's system is and working with these people while feeling inadequately trained is a difficult experience to say the least. They also micromanage your time. If you get back from your 15 minute break and aren't on a call within the first 30 seconds of being back then you're dinged a whole minute for being late. Same with other meetings, etc... I felt like their only priority was for me to take calls as quickly as possible without offering much support for mental health. They offered "free therapists" within their own network but they are inconveniently scheduled Mon-Fri during your work day so you will have to spend either sick time or vacation time to use that resource. There was a fire in our office once and the best they gave us was an extra 15 minute break once the fire was put out. I narrowly avoided a shooting near by our office on penn avenue by about 2 minutes. They gave me an extra 15, no option to do more or go home to fully absorb the fact that I potentially could have been murdered. I love the people I worked with and I'm grateful to have been given a chance, but I would not recommend this job unless you were like me and needed some kind of entry level experience in IT. Even then, I would suggest something else.

A Typical Day at Work:
The typical workday was often chaotic, with a noticeable lack of organization. At times, it seemed the manager struggled to provide clear direction, which contributed to the confusion.

What I Learned:
This experience taught me a valuable lesson — I now know the kind of work environment I don’t want to be part of in the future.

Management:
Management tended to micromanage rather than lead effectively. Accountability was often misplaced, with blame shifted onto others instead of addressing the real issues.

Workplace Culture:
The culture was neutral, not particularly positive or toxic, but certainly lacking in support and motivation.

Hardest Part of the Job:
The most challenging aspect was trying to understand unclear expectations and constantly questioning whether there was any real opportunity for advancement, which unfortunately, there wasn’t.

Most Enjoyable Part of the Job:
Honestly, there wasn’t a truly enjoyable part of the job.


A typical day is 9AM - 6PM with a one-hour lunch, 30 minutes project time, 2x 15-minute breaks; otherwise, you are on the phone all day asking technical questions about the Alarm.com products. Management is great, and the people working here are LGBTQ+ and nerdy. The hardest part of the job is trying not to get burned out. The job requires you to hit all of your KPIs in all of your calls, and every few months, they will be like Wow, you did great and then two months later, the convoluted QA process will pull your four calls. The issue is that 4 calls don't reflect the 70-> 100 calls you take in the month. It is also tough to move up and the technology/Knowledge Base is very confusing for a beginner using their interface. I recommend this job to people who want to get involved with tech or are very young and don't mind getting a little burnt out from processing calls all day 

My time at Alarm.com started very well, I really enjoyed it. Great culture and people really made it a fun place to work. However after about a year and one mistake that I had no control over, a microscope became apparent on me for some reason. I started to lose trust in my supervisors and wasn't being told everything I needed. I was let go after hitting a work anniversary with the company and it was from way out in left field, had no idea it was coming and never really understood the reason for it. Overall I would not recommend the company in the end, once you do one mistake you are seen as expendable and they will push you out and find someone else. It can be very clicky as well after some time there. Information is often withheld from people and can be a detriment for doing your job. 

The company treats this like an entry-level position, so they pay a pretty low rate for what is expected at this job. You're essentially training while on-the-job, dealing with irate/frustrated installation dealers. Jumping from one call to the next. Some calls last 5- 10 minutes, others can last for multiple hours. The breadth of knowledge that's expected for these calls is large. And frankly, the pay rate is way too low for these expectations. I feel bad for the employees that stick with this job for years, putting up with the phone abuse for such a low pay. They are also short staffed. Some people on the phone wait for over an hour. So then this basically doubles that person's frustration. The company has grown quite large over the last decade, and they need to scale their customer support in tandem.

Your experience depends on what department you're working in and your managers. There's poor communication from upper management and especially the HR team about your personal progress and any updates about your position or overall company. The company needs a complete overhaul of some of its upper management staff as they working with processes and rules from the 90s and need to be more open and transparent and especially trust their employees more. For the work thats being done there should be a fair compensation plan and unlimited PTO plan. Lastly, there should be a clear and open onboarding schedule that isn't for the first week of work but for your first year of working there so that employees know and understand when they're progressing or not at all.

I enjoyed working at Alarm.com and only left the company because I was moving to another city without an Alarm.com office. The company culture is very supportive of collaboration and creativity. They provide many benefits, including a healthy work-life balance. We had a gym in the building and many opportunities for personal and professional growth. The hardest part of the job is pushing yourself to consistently meet high performance standards, but the resources are there to help you do so. Managers are all helpful and friendly and want you to succeed. It is not a competitive or cut-throat work place. They value teamwork and keeping employees comfortable and happy,

I can't say enough about how amazing this company is. I've worked for some amazing companies before and I've worked for some really bad ones. But Alarm.com was the first company that I felt honestly cared about me and invested in me personally. I had some personal issues in my life and Alarm.com was MORE than accommodating in making sure I was happy and healthy. They truly care for their employees and that care starts with the CEO and every level of management exemplified his vision. 

I had to leave the company for personal reasons, but I have nothing but awesome memories of the people I worked with.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Senior software engineer 30 salaries reported	$128,683 per year
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Operations associate 9 salaries reported	$21.11 per hour
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