Khan Academy Reviews

- You are expected to give to the company, but the company does not give back to you - Everything good in the job description was started and is run by ICs without company involvement or support (e.g. game nights & social events, affinity groups, career development, etc) - Absolutely toxic culture of positivity - Employees are regularly retaliated against for asking questions, even if it is within their role to do so - People are afraid for their jobs, especially as they watch co-workers get pushed out or outright laid off - While leadership and management say they care about DEI, they aren't willing to do anything tangible to support it and instead focus on "plans for a plan for a plan on a page" - Folks with marginalized and underrepresented identities at the company experience more retaliation, less job growth, and a far higher turn over than than those from non-marginalized groups - Several instances of benefits being rolled back or scaled down, but not for financial reasons as we continue to hear how healthy the company's reserves are - Turn-over is extremely high, and some in leadership actively push people out the door who they don't like - There is no acknowledgement or discussion about the high turn-over, nor the reality of it's impact on morale, either from Leadership or from Management - Extremely few people that leave the company come back because once they've been here they know exactly how awful it is - Engineering is bloated and way over-staffed for the size of the site and the company - The waterfall process for planning-design-development is counter-productive and isolates teams and roles - Non-engineering teams are treated like second-class citizens at the company, even though we're a learning organization - Our teachers (whom we call content-creators like they are YouTube personalities and not actual teachers) are underpaid, overworked, and not-respected - CEO continues to drive the company in bad directions while alienating our teachers as he steps on their work and disrespects their abilities - Our current company direction will never meet our ambitious mission. Not in 100 years - Every single year is a major strategy shift and long term goals will never be met because they never last more than a year - As an organization we put being liked by the public over actually doing anything good or impactful, even going so far as to not announce or share changes which impact our users - There is absolutely zero transparency into decision making at the company. Or any transparency of any kind internally or externally - The relationship between ICs and leadership is toxic and neither side has any faith or trust in the other, which regularly leads to confrontations and blow-ups - There is no management culture. Managers are unsupported and it leads to a lot of awful management practices and decision which hurt ICs and their careers Overall this place is toxic and it kills the spirit of good, passionate people again and again.

The launch of the OpenAI-funded Khanmigo AI tutor was rushed and haphazard. While novel and potentially game-changing, at the end of the day Khanmigo is an experimental product with zero independent efficacy studies, yet is already being sold to underresourced Title I schools. It seems that chasing Silicon Valley clout and buzz is taking precedence over delivering proven and effective tools for the most vulnerable learning communities. The deeply dysfunctional HR team collectively fills the role of COO, with clear and negative impacts on morale. The constant miscommunications on things as foundational as benefits are one thing, but the active obfuscation of the reality of silent layoffs (5+ workers over the past quarter) to mere "team restructuring" is dishonorable. It's one of those cases where workers need to trust their own eyes - there's no need to entertain the cowardly narratives spun by the leadership when the goodbye messages on LinkedIn tell you all you need to know. Further, due to financial constraints, not only have cost of living AND merit increases been paused, but the organization is transitioning everyone's assigned salary benchmark from CoL-sensitive tiers to a lower tier national payscale. While this doesn't result in a paycut for existing workers, this does mean that potential future CoL or merit increases will be mapped to this lower geographic payscale. The tone of all-staff discussions suggest that workers who live in high CoL areas (at least a plurality of the org) could see themselves"maxed out" in terms of future salary growth or CoL increase potential. But in typical Khan Academy fashion, despite workers being promised access to their own payscale information or "compra-ratio", nearly three months have gone by and HR continues to relegate this disclosure to a nebulous future compensation statement. And finally - over the past year there has been a deeply unsettling shift in the nature of communications from leadership, which has had a chilling effect on worker agency and collective psychological safety. From the very top, there are proclamations of our "wartime footing" where we must "disagree then commit", and even multiple occurrences the CEO stating "if you're not fully committed to the mission, maybe Khan Academy isn't the best fit for you" in all-staff meetings. It's hard to feel empowered and engaged as a worker when you're constantly being told that even earnest, well-intentioned questioning of the party line will be read as a lack of loyalty, if not grounds for retaliation.