Pros
I'd like to start the review with positives, because that's how Glassdoor forces me to do it anyway. I was an associate software developer at Scholastic for nearly a year there and I can say it had a lot of promise but ended up being such a terrible dud. Pros: - Work/Life balance: No one really cares much, ended up working from home often. If you value little work, you can get away with it. I tried my best to keep busy, but even then I'd have a ton of downtime. - Other developers were generally nice and there to help. - Make you believe that things would move towards a tech driven company
Cons
Cons...where do I begin. - Salary: Abysmal. Way below average for NYC developers. They tried to give us "quarterly reviews" to string us along for better salaries...but why should I way 2 years to get paid properly? - Poor usage of developers: So much young talent, so little exploration in technologies. Very old practices that have died out, refusal to look at anything new. People get too comfortable there and progress is hindered. - Career roadmap: They expect you to have a maximum of 2 years before you go from associate to regular software developer. 2 years is too long to be an associate. I saw a few very competent developers get milked for a cheaper price because of this 2 year thing. - Management: I had lost 2 managers within 3 months of each other. One was a little too hands on with me, which is fine, but the other barely ever spoke to me and gave me no direction. I was without a manager for a couple of more months, with a lot of nothing to do, before I left. - Location: We were moved from a nice Midtown office to some warehouse in nowheresville Hudson Yards. Undoubtedly this was to save money, fine, but the warehouse was ugly and going to it every day made me feel like a robot. The place was all white and had no interior design at all. Commuting there was hell, as no trains were nearby. No food nearby, just some cafeteria downstairs. When we got there, upper management promised that they'd leverage their Scholastic IP and connections to really brighten up the place, add color and life to it...nope. 10 months later (including up until today, where I asked former employees) and still nothing. The engineers were sent to this warehouse, meanwhile the others are in the nice, very very roomy, Soho office. Yup...go figure. - Layoffs: Some random day, upper management had just decided to lay off a ton of employees. Very random, cut within a moment. Meanwhile, they have a ton of upper management who do nothing and none of them were cut (probably got raises as well). We lost a lot of developers within an instant. They didn't get a nice two week notice. Really made it easy to hand in my sub-2 week notice later on. This led to MANY other developers leaving because of fear of job security, putting a ton of pressure on those who stayed. -Product owners: Terrible people. During agile sprint planning they would CONSISTENTLY try and nudge developers to lower points on tickets to get as much tickets in as they can to maximize velocity. It was gross and totally against agile. - Offshore developers: Yeah, maintaining a 3 million line codebase where you see a lot of if(true) is not fun. We have way too many offshore devs, and the entire old codebase was made by them, so good luck trying to add a simple feature. This techstack is old and gross, to their benefit the developers were trying to move forward but they never got enough time to do it. It never got there. - Broken promises: CTO claimed to be going tech-centric in our first large meeting, completely backpedaled from that and told us they were going to be business oriented again. This led to the misuse of developers. A lot of fake talk about "we want you guys to explore technologies" but never giving us the time, hackathons, or anything to really go outside the bounds of a feature. Unless you were creating a new service, you had to play by old rules. And even with new services many times you were at the mercy of changing your technologies to work with the old systems because they couldn't give time to update theirs. I came to realize they didn't care about their developers much, the cared about upper management and metrics a ton more. Bad salary, bad coding practices, bad people, just overall a bad time. The only fun you can get is ragging on the company with the other associates and getting excited for them when they decide to actually progress their career. The atmosphere there was gloom towards the end, no one actually wanted to be there unless they were in a prominent position.