Great people languishing under terrible leadership
Pros
The recruiters have done an excellent job filling the office with really smart, friendly, well-intentioned people. The firm gives 4 weeks of PTO and has a really beautiful office with great views right downtown. The kitchen is stocked with wine and beer, and there is a closet full of Costco products to snack on. There is a real camaraderie amongst the firm that somehow persists through a very high turnover rate.
Cons
The only company in which I've seen worse morale was one that had filed for bankruptcy and was laying off people to outsource their jobs to China. Ostensibly, this is an organization that wants to improve education, but this facade is only paper thin. Really, they are making money from private schools who use their software for accreditation purposes. The firm is run by one individual who has surrounded himself with powerless yes-men. This would be OK if he were Steve Jobs (as he seems to think he is), but the truth is he is anything but visionary and innovative. I'm trying to think of professional, respectful was to say this, but that would be doing a disservice to all potential employees. The truth is that he is a paranoid, micromanager with an extreme temper and an aversion to change. He believes his product is perfect and fails to either listen to his clients' requests or create a vision for its future based on the changing world of education. This flows down through the entire organization and creates a culture of fear and hopelessness. Employees are regularly ranked against each other with arbitrary statistics. People with vision and inspiration are pitted against each other and sometimes even sabotaged in order to keep them in their place. Before interacting with their leader, employees consult with each other about his current mood to see if the are liable to get screamed at. If he doesn’t like the way a particular meeting is going he will storm out in a huff. Sadly, the leader is unable to see how his employees are attempting to help save his firm, and instead treats their ideas and innovations as challenges to his authority and “position of strength.” I began to hear stories about leaders coming in with grand hopes, only to be forced out. Sure enough, this happened just as a new partner left to "spend more time with his family” this September after only a year. They hired an entire team to design new products, but they all quit within a year when it became apparent that there were never going to be any new products because the partners couldn't commit to a vision. Losing clients left and right, the firm refuses to acknowledge that this could be due to an antiquated product that is built on a database original created by amateurs in MS Access 12 years ago, which supports education processes that are losing favor in the industry. Instead, blame is placed on the employees not managing their "relationships" with clients well enough. There is a myth amongst employees that they cannot leave because the salaries are so good and anywhere else would pay them less. Having talked with several people who've left, this is completely untrue. Salaries are indeed high in comparison to the teacher salaries many of their employees used to make, but in the private sector they actually pay less than average. I happened to be sitting near the recruitment team when they were discussing what to do about “The Glassdoor problem,” and their solution was to add their own positive reviews. A short time later the two reviews from March, 2015 appeared.
