Pros
-Small company means many professional growth opportunities
-Very easy to gain leadership experience
-Telecommuting
-Access to some reasonably big names in the worlds of tech, academia etc.
Cons
If you have ever worked at a Chinese education company, you already know the deal. Here are the cons for those who don’t:
-IF YOU ARE CHINESE OR AN INTERNATIONAL STUDENT: Get ready for poor treatment from the directors. Recent graduates will be threatened with firing frequently and international students will be told that the company will never sponsor H1B students again if they do a bad job. They will treat you like second-class citizens, stall on giving you the insurance benefits you are promised in your contract, then blame it on “miscommunication.”
-IF YOU ARE NON-CHINESE: Get ready to be regarded as the voice of American parents (even if you are not a parent) and have your suggestions not taken seriously. Your position title will not reflect the breadth of your responsibilities so as not to upset the older staff. Also if you speak Mandarin (a regular hiring requirement), get ready to be assigned to projects you have no experience in and no desire to lead pretty much because having a non-Chinese face sells the product better, allegedly.
-IF YOU ARE BIPOC/LGBTQ/JEWISH/MUSLIM ETC: Get ready for some well-intended but problematic microaggressions from the managing staff. Ultimately you can chalk these up to them just being out of touch with US social standards but it may come as a shock to those new to this kind of environment.
-IF YOU ARE A NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKER (or have high English proficiency): Get ready to be cajoled into tutoring/teaching roles that would otherwise be contracted out to the teaching staff and will probably need to happen outside working hours. It really makes you feel like the company is just using you to save a buck.
-You will regularly be expected to work weekend and non working-hours events (they will not make this clear in the interview or contract because they don’t want to scare you away). They will leave accounting for the hours up to you, and try to peer-pressure you into working on holidays that your contract says you have off. They know this demand is unfair, and will try to write it off as a “start-up environment,” but what company still calls themselves a start-up after 7 years?
-Lopsided management structure with very uneven middle-management. Some departments have heads and others do not, making their work very uncoordinated and messy.
-Certain things outsourced to Chinese companies/contractors in a way that greatly hurts efficiency. The CRM is a difficult-to-use Chinese-developed version of Salesforce. The marketing materials person and former web developer are both based in China and don’t speak strong English (accounting for English materials with egregious mistakes).
-They will monitor your social media use and chide you for not engaging with the company’s content enough. They will also pressure you to promote the company on your personal social media (which legally they cannot make you do).
-Founders will expect to be able to reach you at all times and may violate your privacy.
-Bad health insurance plans with high co-pays and deductibles.