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      Prodigy Education

      Engaged employer

      Prodigy Education Reviews

      3.0

      41% would recommend to a friend

      (274 total reviews)

      Alex Peters & Rohan Mahimker

      29% approve of CEO

      25% positive business outlook

      Prodigy Education has an employee rating of 3.0 out of 5 stars, based on 274 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an average working experience there. The Prodigy Education employee rating is 22% below average for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

      Reviews by job title

      274 reviews
      3.0
      25 Nov 2021

      Know what you are getting into.

      Software engineer
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business outlook

      Pros

      The first thing anyone should know about working at Prodigy is that they continually ask employees to go write them Glassdoor reviews. That is why you see so many here that are 5 stars with barely any content. They love to tout their high review average. Stating that we are the 1% and reviews will help maintain that status. To be clear, they do not violate Glassdoor's review policies. There are no promised incentives or any sort of coercion. It is just repeatedly asked. I will do my best here to outline exactly what you are getting into with details, without breaking confidentiality. The second thing you should know is that this is not a game company. It is barely even an education company. Leadership cares only about becoming a successful tech giant. The student experience always comes last. Rather than focusing on what will help students learn best, or give them the most engaging experience possible, the goal is only ever revenue. While the mission may be "Help every student love to learn", not once has anyone in leadership ever set a goal to make the product more enjoyable from the student perspective. The word "game" is barely spoken. Footage of it is almost never shown during the biweekly All-Hands meetings. It has even been directly stated that the game was a happy accident. The mission itself is used more as a tool to manipulate employees into working long hours and burning themselves out. There was once a slide of a crying Black child during an All-Hands that stated "Remember, if we fail we don't lose. The kids lose". Features added that have many concerns raised about them are developed and released anyway. When they fail, we are told there was no way to know without trying. When asking to see the data that was used to pick this direction, we are told it does not exist. An example of this is the recent PVP arena where students have bots battle for them while they are offline. At launch this meant a student could login and see that they have earned negative points just because they were not playing. The negative reception to this was very obvious for many of us on the Product teams, yet our voices went unheard. This mistake is repeated over and over again. While claiming they learn from their mistakes, for over three years I saw zero learnings. Rather than listening to the individual contributors, leadership makes decisions behind closed doors and pushes them from the top down. There is only the facade of autonomy. Do a brainstorming session to make the team feel like their input is being taken, then take action on something that wasn't even written on the board. Here is the work cycle: - Join a team at the start of a quarter - Two weeks in, have a massive pivot that undoes all of the planning - Cut the feature down as much as possible so that design, development, testing and release can all fit into the remaining two months - Release this "MVP", so barebones it is barely viable ,with plans to iterate - End the quarter and be shifted to another team where the cycle starts again - The MVP is never iterated on as that team has been dissolved and priorities have changed Now all of this said, here is why I still gave it 3 stars: - I worked hard and was rewarded for it receiving 5 promotions in just over 3 years - Many of the individuals at the company are great. Intelligent and have become my close friends - My direct managers were always as transparent as they could be. I felt respected, heard and informed

      Cons

      Diversity is severely lacking in leadership. If you popped your head into a meeting of managers you would assume all you need is to be a bald white male to get promoted. There are Lunch and Learns with guest speakers about this and yet almost none of the executive team attends. During the Women in the Workplace lunch and learn, a group of men decided the best thing to do was to start sharing articles in the Zoom chat about what THEY know about women at work instead of just listening to the panel of women speaking. The first question asked during the Q&A was from a man asking "How can I as a white male do better?". Always about you isn't it. Core values don't hold up in practice. Radical Candor is the biggest offender here. You get punished for not giving feedback and punished for giving it. I once had a terribly unproductive meeting. I spoke to the person leading the meeting and told them why I thought it was unproductive and proposed a list of improvements for the next one. They implemented some of these and it was much better. Yet, somehow it came back down on me as "not using enough pleasantries" when giving feedback. Sorry, I guess I should smile more often. Leadership is one of three types: - Severely inexperienced with no idea what they are doing - A company drone just delivering messages from above - An industry veteran with great ideas who mysteriously leaves the company within 6 months of joining Prodigy CAN be a great place to work if: - You are okay making products to make money, not to transform education - You can keep your head down and avoid office politics - You are okay being asked to work long days and weekends to meet unattainable targets - You are okay being paid average for 60-80 hour weeks - You are okay being told to reschedule your vacations because of deadlines - You can handle your best work only meeting expectations - You are a minority who is okay with being both dismissed and scrutinized for your actions - You are a straight white male. My review may be the longest, but if you read the others that say more than "No cons this place is great!" you will see the common threads.

      avatar
      Prodigy Education Response
      4y
      Thank you for taking the time to post. We appreciate your personal experience of more than four years with us is very subjective - every employee’s experience is unique - and feel it’s important to share additional perspective and clarity on some of the topics you’ve raised. Just as with this review, we sincerely appreciate it when team members take the time to share their feedback on Glassdoor. It helps in two ways: (1) in ensuring that people have an avenue for feedback beyond our Slack channels, polls and surveys, AMAs, and live Q&As and (2) in helping us learn more about how team members prefer to communicate. We do occasionally highlight the fact that our Prodigy Glassdoor page exists and invite people to post if they feel appropriate, but to your point, this is neither mandatory or incentivized. Glassdoor is a great way for current team members and alumni to comment on our workplace and culture in an open and transparent way. Prodigy is very much focused on game-based learning. We regularly present new game features and initiatives at All Hands presentations, with our philosophy of ‘Motivation First!’ core to our approach. In all feature development, failure is an important part of the journey, helping us to validate or rethink new ideas and theories. We embrace risk and failure and openly admit when something hasn’t worked as planned - then we pivot. Everything we do is a learning process and with the response and engagement we see from our users, we’re confident that we’re taking the right approach. We continually strive to improve our students’ experience with our product. This is strongly tied to our culture value of being User Obsessed and is also directly linked to our mission to help every student in the world love learning. Creating and sustaining a great student experience is integral to that mission. We absolutely need revenue to grow and thrive, and to reinvest in new learning experiences for our users - none of which can be achieved without a great user experience. Regarding long hours, we are working diligently to ensure priorities and workloads are managed accordingly, with team members encouraged to come forward if that balance isn’t right. We take your feedback about long hours very seriously - not only has the impact of increasing workload become a global issue, but it is extremely counter-culture at Prodigy. The pandemic has meant we've all had to learn and manage a new way of working. We all need to take an active role in setting boundaries and carving out productivity time. Leverage our 10:30-3 core hours for meetings and block the rest in your calendar. Work with meeting requestors to find time within those hours wherever possible. There are things that Prodigy needs to do to help manage workload and we’re actively and intentionally reducing and reprioritizing our strategic plans to ensure that we’re targeting our collective energy at a manageable set of objectives. In addition to our core hours of 10:30-3 and Deep Work periods, we’ve introduced additional time off for team members to help us all to take time and recharge. Overall, we need to learn new ways to establish our boundaries with work, and work needs to give us ways to do that. We’re continuing to figure out how to achieve this balance together, as our environment changes. We’ll close on the topic of diversity because the comment regarding our leadership is categorically false. Our executive leadership team is diverse in nature, including men, women and people of colour, and we are working with our retained EDI Consultant to ensure that equity, diversity and inclusion are cemented into our foundation across people, process and product. We launched our EDI Deep-Dive in August-September and learned that we have incredibly diverse teams across Prodigy. We represent 3 countries (where we are currently living), 33 languages, 12 ethnicities, 15 racial groups, 11 religious and spiritual affiliation, and 6 gender identities. We also learned that we have opportunities to improve equity and elevate diversity in our first- and mid-level management teams which is an integral part of the foundation we’re building. There is a great deal of work - learning, growing, building - to be done before we can truly celebrate our EDI efforts and accomplishments. We are working hard to become the best version of ourselves and appreciate the engagement of all of our team members, including our Allies who help move us forward.
      2.0
      9 Mar 2024

      Potential, Big ideas, Nepotism, Squandered

      Anonymous employee
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business outlook

      Pros

      - Day 1 Benefits - The benefits are really good - HSA for benefits - Extra long weekends - Some extremely talented individuals in all departments/teams - Remote work +++ - WFH stipend - Recruiting team is good - Immediate team is usually very nice - Inclusive - Focused on gathering employee feedback - The kids that use the product are passionate and excited about it - Financial transparency during All-Hands meetings - Personal days

      Cons

      - Benefits just got worse in 2023 - Social time with other departments is non-existent - Gathered feedback generally leads to minimal or lowest-rung initiatives at best, or nothing at worst - Generally only see other team members for singular Holiday event - No real HQ anymore; the Toronto office is too small and too inconvenient for 60%+ of employees to actually use or visit - Development teams are forced to pivot frequently - High impact churn; talented individuals see the games being played and find employment elsewhere, while those left to maintain are either indifferent or not as skilled to keep up - Layoffs/releases/leaves are not discussed anywhere; the only way to find out someone you worked with is gone is to attempt to message them - A mostly tone-deaf HR department more concerned with PC culture than helping staff - CEO's pivot on the whim of whoever's whispering in their ear - this has caused repeated failed initiatives, and a massive misalignment in vision over and over again - Repeated layoffs at a company level - Leadership team now resorts to cleaving siloed departments so word doesn't spread as easily - SLT comes across as deceptive and insincere

      avatar
      Prodigy Education Response
      2y
      Hello, thank you for sharing your feedback. I’ve looked to address some of your feedback below. However, given the breadth of your comments, I would appreciate the opportunity to connect in person, assuming you are comfortable. Please reach out to me at sarah-jayne.lehtinen@prodigygame.com. Regarding changes to benefits, these followed an extensive consultative process with team members, which included surveys and focus groups to ensure our package was meeting their needs. As a result, we added more and increased both coverage and flexibility for employees. Specifically, we added some of the following: Separating mental health support into its own category with its own funds. We also increased the maximum across all of the various paramedical categories. Combining basic and major dental to give you a larger bucket for either grouping, which increases the flexibility for our employees. We added a short term disability coverage We increased the maximum coverage for Life Insurance and AD&D. Most of the other elements of the plan remained unchanged. This plan doesn't have any cost-sharing with the employee, with the exception of a $3 prescription deductible that was added in 2023. However, we have not received any employee feedback that this prescription deductible is a problem. We also agree that a combination of in-person and remote working is the best way to deliver the best outcomes and employee experience. As such, we hold two company in-person events each year and we have been encouraging in person each month for the All Hands since everything began to open up after Covid in 2021. We also continue to encourage teams to come in at least monthly—and many have been! Our Toronto office is across the street from Union Station to support the commute in. We have two floors that can accommodate our teams and we have been working at continuously improving it to ensure it’s effective for our in person time together. We do have further plans and upgrades for this year also! Finally, as Chief People Officer I’m always committed to reading and responding to all reviews left on Glassdoor. I always look to be open, honest and authentic, and also remain open to discussing issues 1-1 if preferable or desired.
      1.0
      12 Oct 2021

      Wrong Executive Team

      Anonymous employee
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business outlook

      Pros

      Prodigy is a great place to be if you are a junior looking to take on the world. Lots of really positive learning experiences and an opportunity to do something that matters.

      Cons

      Please don't let the following cons scare you away. These are real issues but they are issues that can and will be fixed. This is meant as a rip the bandaid off, not a trash the company on the way out the door kind of commentary. Over the years, there has been a shift away from doing what we are good at and much more of a focus around being micro managed by an executive team that inspires nobody and drives a culture of getting through your performance review. Nobody takes any risks, it's not worth it to your performance review. Nobody talks back to their executive rep, it's not worth it to your performance review. Nobody risks anything to make the company actually better. We used to have a no-politicking policy, but we've just rebranded it to strategizing, and it's everywhere. No team can risk taking on any longer running initiative, as everything shifts every few weeks, and now all that high impact work is trashed and you wasted time. In order to keep up with shifting priorities from on high, it is normal to see team members pushing 60-80 hours a week just to "meet expectations". If you took a survey, I would guarantee that most people are having to put in at least 60 hours, and that number increases with seniority. Executives are too busy trying to look good rather than actually produce anything of value. Concentrating so much on one distilled metric rather than trying to make any significant moves to reach our goals. It's safer to make a 3-5% improvement on x than spend 6-12 months transforming ourselves into something better. Get rid of the project management by committee time wasters (*cough* IMF *cough*) and get back to getting real stuff done. Let teams do what they do, and own their own paths. Please start looking at the actual value to our mission, rather than trying to convince yourself that a small increase to open rates or some other mundane metric is worth 3 months... Star players are dropping like crazy because it's not worth it to be exploited by your passion to help kids learn. There are countless numbers of inspiring and awesome rock stars that have just said no thanks, and they politely leave. Please take a closer look at why these people are leaving, and read between the lines... The buck has to stop with senior leadership. These issues have been going on for far too long and the culture you are creating is toxic. It's time for some accountability. Note to any executive reading this: If this information or opinion seems new to you, or you think this is a one off, then you aren't listening. Note to HR who will respond to this with the regular copy and paste "Thank you for your concerns and please talk to us, we want to work with you to understand...", please don't. I know you will anyways because it's just how you respond to critical feedback, but just to let others know, that response means nothing and goes nowhere. These are not new issues and we consistently fail to make any meaningful progress to address these or take any of this seriously. These types of things are brought up in almost every single anonymous question all-hands and nothing is ever done to make any progress. This is information that is meant to let potential new team members know what it's like, since it seems like none of this is going to get fixed any time soon.

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      Glassdoor has 311 Prodigy Education reviews submitted anonymously by Prodigy Education employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Prodigy Education is right for you.