Teaching Strategies Reviews

3.9

80% would recommend to a friend

(173 total reviews)
avatar

Mike Derezin

100% approve of CEO

75% positive business outlook

Teaching Strategies has an employee rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars, based on 173 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Teaching Strategies employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Education industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

173 reviews
1.0
6 Sept 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Developers working with you are great (the only reason this company stays afloat)

Cons

Be prepared to enter in a ColdFusion codebase nightmare: nobody wants to use ColdFusion nowadays, but if you are going to work here as software engineer eventually you have to, and no one tells you that during an interview; 60% of the entire codebase is ColdFusion. You are not going to learn new skills, you will learn how to constantly patch broken/old software in an unorganized environment. The use of solid and mature software frameworks is discouraged: everything is custom made in house, therefore no consistency across code. The bad thing is that it is a recognized negative behavior, but there is no willing to change this mentality. Every piece of codebase has a collection of unwritten rules that only low level engineers have to abide by, but "inner circle" engineer have the power to bend at will w/o accountability. Technical Debt is grossly overused/abused and constantly pushed under the carpet creating a patch-based code development (more than a year and still no tech debt repay plan in sight). There is no clear software development plan/roadmap: CTO and tech managers have no real plan/idea on what to do for the next 6 months, after more than a year asking for a simple roadmap software development plan the only answer has been "we're working on it and we'll have it and share it in the next month"... still nothing. The only short-term plan I've witnessed was to make the CEO happy by changing the logo and having more testers working for a while. After a year of promises to address what's broken, none of them were addressed. As a former colleague used to say to describe the software development at Teaching Strategies: "you can always put some fancy icing on a rotten cake, but at it's core it's still a rotten cake".

1.0
28 Aug 2015

Should be voted Worst Place to work in the DMV

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- some of the newer leaders in the company are trying to turn the ship - convenient location in downtown Bethesda

Cons

- nasty, negative work culture - lack of key work resources (software and tools) - no strategic thinking - most employees are not qualified for the work they are doing - low salaries for people who actually do the work - an attitude of blaming and shaming from most of the more senior staff members - poor work/ life balance with no support from the company to change

1.0
1 Dec 2017

Falling Fast

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great mission to help early childhood, company started off right but now is declining everyday. Good curriculum, nice looking office

Cons

Senior leadership is out of touch with employees, If you are not apart of the CEO’s best friends club you will not be promoted no matter how well you do. Terrible decision making, promotions to people who do not deserve it or even worse has no experience ever in doing that job. If you are a friend of the CEO you can be a associate and less than 6 months later you can be a executive. If you’re a friend you can totally mess up (like fireable offense) and you will be promoted because it’s not your fault that that happened the people you manage are the problem. If you go against the SLT way of thinking even if you’re right you will be fired. Please do yourself a favor and stay away.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 173 Reviews

Glassdoor has 188 Teaching Strategies reviews submitted anonymously by Teaching Strategies employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Teaching Strategies is right for you.