Pros
-Lots of flexibility as a company in terms of when, where, how you work. Generally people within the organization are also highly supportive of respecting time off and allowing for that flexibility as well-- it just requires a bit more communication (note: "coverage" while you're OOTO is not really done well by others as it's a small team). -There are some genuinely smart and talented people here though and the brand and work has a very mission-driven mindset. People believe in the idea behind the company and that's great. -The Learning & Professional Development have major gaps that the Degreed idea (and some aspects of the current product) fulfill, so it's nice to work for an aspirational business that also fulfills a real need across an industry. -Agile workflow allows for some updates to happen very fast for the Degreed Product, which can be helpful but also hard to follow across an organization of 130 people.
Cons
-Poor leadership/management culture: it's a touchy-feely, mission-driven org but that doesn't mean that the leadership knows how to organize, engage, and execute on strategy and promises. For example: it's uncomfortable when the CEO starts crying on the company-wide call because anonymous employees point out there is a lack of diversity and promotion of women specifically across the organization and they want leadership to address it. In this instance, it seemed like the CEO should have consulted with his team and prepared to address the issue beforehand, instead of reading & responding emotionally in real-time. It came off as both unproductive and unprofessional and is not an example of leading in a way that inspires confidence. -Unprofessional: Yes, it's an agile start-up but at some point to become scale-able and take advantage of the work, learning, and efforts across the team, some level of training and process are needed to empower employees with information--especially when the majority of the team is remote (no face-to-face contact, different timezones, etc). Additionally, with blue-chip & Fortune 500 clients under contract with an expectation to adopt new features the sheer lack of visibility to product changes, roadmap, and timing (or responses to existing issues) contributes to an extremely inconsistent level of client service. Some of that is a normal part of start-up life, launching a new product (especially software) but much of that is poor transparency/training/and access to information about the changes forthcoming. I think it will get better (it has to!) but the current leadership has not shown that they are open to working across the company team to make that happen. -Politics: One of the reasons I initially joined Degreed was in hopes of spending less time on company politics and more time delving into the work of making things happen. I found that most employees--including some of the leadership--were all about this as well, however there are some head-cases that really liked to emphasize "levels" within the organization and didn't hesitate to openly use trump cards in a public forum to shut down lower-level employees. I agree with another reviewer here that there were definitely inner circle "boys club" moments. That wasn't as big of a deal to me, but I did take issue with the shutting down of individual contributors within the organization in front of coworkers who weren't in that circle and saw this repeated behavior from leaders and managers. Again, no people or companies are perfect but this behavior did not foster the kind of "design thinking" and collaborative environment that Degreed likes to share as its foundational story. I both experienced and observed this multiple times, which was a big part of my reason for no longer wanting to work with the company.