Pursuit Reviews

I'm writing this review some time after leaving Pursuit, as I really wanted to make sure what I said was thoughtful and not reactionary. With some time and space away from the company, I feel much more confident now in saying that this place is a mess. If you work at Pursuit, you may experience the following: - Projects being launched with lots of fanfare only to then be killed months later, after hundreds of hours of work. - Schedules for staff and Fellows (our "customers") changing constantly and significantly, sometimes with little warning or even after being told they would not change. - Priorities regularly shifting from quarter to quarter, based on the C-Suite's personal feelings and passions. - Absolutely no meaningful feedback from anyone in management. - Huge meetings without agendas or goals. It doesn't matter, as often these meetings are deleted or rescheduled an hour or less before their supposed to occur. - A steady stream of quitting from your Fellow coworkers, particularly those in middle management. - A solid amount of crying from both staff and Fellows. The C-Suite will say that a lot of this is because they're a startup and aim to be "agile" and "flexible" in how they approach the organization's "very hard work." This is just not true. The reason the organization is a mess is because the C-Suite is hyper-resistant to feedback of any kind. If it's not their idea, it will eventually be deemed a bad idea. This is a pretty big problem, because none of the C-Suite have any professional experience in education, nonprofits, or technology. This leads to a culture where experts are hired to lead a particular part of the various programs run by Pursuit, and then are told that their ideas are bad and that they just don't understand the "Pursuit secret sauce." After toiling for months, these experts will leave, having been demoralized and silently demoted to doing busy work while the C-Suite micromanages their projects with little knowledge of how to do anything. And that's just the work environment. If you think you'll just put up with the environment to do good work, you'll find yourself disappointed. I would describe the outcomes for the main program run by Pursuit as anecdotal. That is, Pursuit is happy to trot out the same few success stories whenever they are asked but is reticent to publish hard data on how many of their Fellows get jobs within six months after completing the program. But, don't just listen to me. Listen to the many other negative reviews on this page. It is astounding the number of reviews from 2016 or 2017 that identify the same problems the organization is experiencing today. It's my belief that the reason these problems persist is because the leadership has not changed throughout that entire tenure. It seems to be the only constant throughout this time.

Run as fast as you can in the opposite direction of this negative impact nightmare, or you will harm your bank account and your career in order to help hateful people exploit vulnerable communities. The toxic environment at Coalition for Queens is both intentional and psychologically abusive in nature. The decisions of the leadership are so incompetent, so aggressive, and so arbitrary it is as if the true purpose of the organization is to provide Jukay Hsu with a steady stream of people to treat abusively. "Data-driven" is nothing but a catch phrase the Managing Director shouts while she is terrorizing people. This place is trying to exist outside of reality. They've accumulated four years of evidence that you can not pay people this poorly and then treat them this badly. Nothing has changed, and nothing is going to change. The "high stress" of the workplace is not due to pace, to hours, or to disorganization; it's due to abusive management. At C4Q, the only people less respected than the employees are the students, who are routinely spoken of, and sometimes to, with shocking condescension. Each student signs an agreement to "Pay it Forward" with 12% of their salary for next three years, then thirty-six of them are crammed into a classroom with one instructor and no curriculum. Despite the lack of any resources beyond a loud classroom and an unstable internet connection, almost half of the students will get jobs through their own herculean effort and then begin a tech career with a $30,000 albatross around their necks. The majority will have payed an extraordinary opportunity cost for nothing. No one cares, and no one pretends to.