Infobase Reviews

1. No professional development or career advancement. You will be stuck in the same position for years and years, and you won't be taught any new skills or programs that will help you leave this place. 2. Prepare for the panopticon. Your emails will be monitored, as will your Internet usage. 3. Back to the past. The office setting, as well as its technology and payscale, is a throwback to 1983. Work here long enough and you will begin to look like a character from the "Cathy" or "Dilbert" comic strips. 4. Rude and abusive managers. The CEO likes to have open-door meetings with his managers, who he loudly reprimands and never praises. He leads by example, and the managers follow suit.

There is absolutely NO opportunity for growth or advancement, and nobody at the company has gotten so much as a cost-of-living raise since 2008. As a result, they're having a harder and harder time retaining talented, caring employees. In the end, money was the main reason I had to look elsewhere. Office politics tends to negatively impact the environment. Those who get along with certain high-ups tend to have their ideas heard, and those who don't tend to be ignored at best and outright bullied at worst. Of course, in the end, what the company ends up doing is down to the capricious whims of the CEO, who, despite being in charge of an educational technology company has a minimal grasp on both education AND technology. He changes his mind on a dime, so projects that people might have been working on for months will suddenly be shelved in favor of something they worked on two or three years ago (which they will be expected to recall with perfect clarity immediately and pick up without missing a beat). He's also got a volatile temper and could not possibly care less about whether or not anybody is satisfied with their job. Every couple of years the company acquires a new, smaller company, which poses new challenges as they take on the square pegs of new assets and try to force them into the round holes of the company's tangentially related existing assets. Then a bunch of people get laid off, and usually also everyone loses a fringe benefit like life insurance or 401K matching. Others have said that the CEO only cares about profit margins, but I don't even think he does, because I can't imagine the company's possibly turning a profit at this point. My theory is that the whole enterprise is just functioning as a massive tax write-off for the venture capital firm that owns it, and nobody actually cares about making money. (Though they certainly don't care about innovating or improving the educational experience, either, so I don't actually know what the primary goal is. Again, upper management wasn't big on communicating these things to us.)