Smoke and Mirrors, Stingy, Low pay, Cult-Like Hustle Culture - Principal Software Engineer Pearson Employee Review

Smart people, supportive environment and good benefits

Tight deadlines and it gets busy at times

Remote, $2300 a month for not that many hours of work.

The widespread incoherence of Pearson is irritating me to a significant degree. -the hiring committee mentioned the wrong pay rate so I spent a month worrying about money -the payroll agency shared the actual pay rate which was sustainable ($2,300 a month, my bills are $1,800, $2,100 with your fee baked in. - I procrastinated this week because I didn't know how to read the bureaucratese on the assignment - I figured out how to read the bureaucratese and went back to K. saying, I think I've developed something genuinely useful as a reference material for new employees. I had to synthesize information from 100 pages of PowerPoints into a two page document which cleared up the anxiety I had about how to start -can't believe K. and other managers worked as Classroom Teachers because the way they scatter information has no coherence. I had to peruse numerous documents in the SharePoint "cloud" folders, take notes, and develop a master reference document before I could interpret how to develop questions based on the bureaucratese. -I was never the most organized classroom teacher but my students knew what was expected of them. I put dates on assignments that were linear and in a consecutive sequence of beginning of week, midweek, end of week. If students had a test, I made a review sheet that was a consolidated 2-7 pages. I would never expect even my Honors students to consult dozens of pages in order to study. -I told K. about the reference document I developed and she met me partway: she recognizes one aspect of the process could be better done, new employees could be more adequately trained on the acronyms we use. That's like 25% of the way to completion. I had to figure out that "Administration 2" means the second half of a course AKA Economics for 5th and 7th graders, and 11E just means 11th grade Economics. But instead of the standards being sorted by subject, they are sorted by grade. Since the standards start with 5 for anything 5th grade, 7 for anything 7th grade, 11 for anything 11th grade, it would be coherent to just combine the standards into one document and organize by subject. -Some companies are smart, caring people trapped inside of bad systems. Like classroom teachers. Pearson feels like a repeat of my last company in its poor design and incoherence but less abusive. H) Pearson assigned us 11 questions in a spreadsheet. I think fewer mistakes would be made if they paid a college student Education major $15 an hour to type up our assignments with the criteria they want for each question. Our time is worth $30-$100 an hour. We are subject matter experts. But comprehending the bureaucratese drains cognitive energy. -I had anxiety about getting all 11 questions produced then K. said, oh you only turn in one question for the first week. Something they never said on the Microsoft Teams meeting we had last Wednesday for onboarding. If I received a sheet with 11 questions in the cloud and my name on it that's what I'm going to think I need to accomplish. But K. put in another email, only submit one question for a week. Email should be subordinate to the cloud, the cloud should supersede email ex. The federal government supremacy clause: federal government has greater authority than state governments. -Spent an hour trying to save the questions I developed in Abbi, only for them not to process and upload. Abbi feels clunky with technical failures of the early internet