Pros
There are some amazing people. I’ve found people I call my friends today, I met people I call my mentors. I’ve learned a lot. I would even say that many of the changes have been dealt with pretty well. Acquisition. Private. IPO. Many layoffs. The perks are not bad, standard for a tech company. For a while it did seem like a great company to work for & I didn’t have too many complaints to be quite frank.
Cons
Now this is where it gets interesting. Let’s start with career progression. This really depends on the team you’re in & who your line manager is. Which is good in theory, but not standardized across the business. The problem is, that there is a lot of favoritism and a lot of people concern themselves with questions like “If I promote this person, then I need to also promote this other person”. Promotions should be based on skill set and capabilities. What ends up happening all the time within the marketing org: people get promoted without the required skills. Or people who have the skill sets don’t get promoted, because another person on the wider team can’t be promoted. Yeah. I don’t get it either, the decision making is made on a whim and without any business sense - just politics. Culturally, I’ve definitely seen a decline within the marketing team. Collaboration and transparency are promoted as the main pillars of Instructure’s culture, but there’s been a shift towards petty behavior and gossiping in the last year. I’m not sure if this is just because I’ve been exposed to it more and it always existed, or if this toxicity is a new development. There are cliques and if you are not a pushover (meaning you speak your mind - which has been emphasized in endless All-Hands as one of the most important things Instructure wants to foster), then you are blacklisted or written off as a nuisance. If you don’t think certain people’s ideas are the best thing since sliced bread, well then… you should probably leave because no good word will be spoken about you by some members of the marketing leadership team. The audacity of some people in the leadership team goes far - the communication is ridiculously bad. Most team members are not involved in hiring (even if someone will be reporting into you - you just get informed that you are now managing a person that’s not even necessarily the most qualified choice), no communication around targets, nonsensical suggestions of career progression (or sometimes even stating that your career will just not progress, and that they really can’t help you), making ridiculous monetary suggestions that then turn out to be nothing, gossiping about you to other team members in a public forum - the list goes on and on. The root of the problem is that some members of the marketing leadership team seem to only be concerned with how they look in front of the exec staff, leading to rash decisions in “panic mode”, without thinking of the consequences for anyone else. There’s no longer really a concern for employee well-being. It’s mainly about damage control, gossiping & trying to keep face. This is pretty sad, because I used to respect many of these people. I always thought Instructure was a great place, with good people. Now I’m witnessing the development of a toxic company culture, which drives many away from the business.