Teaching Strategies Reviews

3.9

80% would recommend to a friend

(171 total reviews)
avatar

Mike Derezin

100% approve of CEO

80% positive business outlook

Teaching Strategies has an employee rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars, based on 171 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Teaching Strategies employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Education industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

171 reviews
1.0
6 Sept 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Developers working with you are great (the only reason this company stays afloat)

Cons

Be prepared to enter in a ColdFusion codebase nightmare: nobody wants to use ColdFusion nowadays, but if you are going to work here as software engineer eventually you have to, and no one tells you that during an interview; 60% of the entire codebase is ColdFusion. You are not going to learn new skills, you will learn how to constantly patch broken/old software in an unorganized environment. The use of solid and mature software frameworks is discouraged: everything is custom made in house, therefore no consistency across code. The bad thing is that it is a recognized negative behavior, but there is no willing to change this mentality. Every piece of codebase has a collection of unwritten rules that only low level engineers have to abide by, but "inner circle" engineer have the power to bend at will w/o accountability. Technical Debt is grossly overused/abused and constantly pushed under the carpet creating a patch-based code development (more than a year and still no tech debt repay plan in sight). There is no clear software development plan/roadmap: CTO and tech managers have no real plan/idea on what to do for the next 6 months, after more than a year asking for a simple roadmap software development plan the only answer has been "we're working on it and we'll have it and share it in the next month"... still nothing. The only short-term plan I've witnessed was to make the CEO happy by changing the logo and having more testers working for a while. After a year of promises to address what's broken, none of them were addressed. As a former colleague used to say to describe the software development at Teaching Strategies: "you can always put some fancy icing on a rotten cake, but at it's core it's still a rotten cake".

1.0
28 Aug 2015

Should be voted Worst Place to work in the DMV

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- some of the newer leaders in the company are trying to turn the ship - convenient location in downtown Bethesda

Cons

- nasty, negative work culture - lack of key work resources (software and tools) - no strategic thinking - most employees are not qualified for the work they are doing - low salaries for people who actually do the work - an attitude of blaming and shaming from most of the more senior staff members - poor work/ life balance with no support from the company to change

Viewing 1 - 3 of 171 Reviews

Glassdoor has 186 Teaching Strategies reviews submitted anonymously by Teaching Strategies employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Teaching Strategies is right for you.