Pros
My team was the best thing about the job. From the production assistants to content developers/learning designers to marketing, most of the people who had individual contributor roles were dedicated, hard-working, and collaborative. There was a sense of camaraderie and we really pulled for one another. Work-life balance was easy to maintain. There were a lot of opportunities to WFH and, depending on your location/role, flexibility. The last good thing was being able to interact with professors. Hearing first-hand about what's going on in the classroom, and giving them a chance to express and discuss the challenges they faced was incredible. So many people go into the industry wanting to make professors' lives easier and have a tangible impact on students. Their passion and enthusiasm for teaching was a huge source of motivation and really made me want to create something they'd find valuable.
Cons
Too many to fully list: - No coherent vision from ELT. Priorities were constantly shifting with little explanation beyond "we think this makes sense." - Constant reorgs. So many smart, talented, dedicated people have been unceremoniously dumped that it's hard to fathom how things are still running. - Rampant favoritism. Certainly in terms of promotion and retention, but also when it came to greenlighting and funding projects. The company has probably wasted a small fortune building poorly-designed products that nobody wants to use. By the time those dismal sales figures roll in, that person has already been promoted and it's somebody else's mess to clean up (usually by ditching the product). - Unwillingness to dedicate resources to executing on product ideas. Even when projects are funded, there's a constant scaling-back through all phases of development, such that what's released doesn't actually address the original needs that were described. - Creating needless bureaucratic bottlenecks. Look, if you say "too many teams are doing XYZ, from now on all XYZ activities need to flow through the XYZ team," then you better staff that team appropriately. There's a proliferation of narrowly-focused teams that add no value and suck up time and resources that could be better deployed. - Upper management is arrogant, dismissive, and unprofessional.