Prodigy Education

4.0

4 Mar 2022

Recommend

CEO approval

Business outlook

Pros

I'm going to be honest, I think the 1 star reviews are off the mark. I have worked at 1 star companies. This is much better than a 1 star company and I think some employees have lost perspective on how good it really is here. I'll try to write this as un-biased as I can from a job hunter's perspective: The reason you're seeing so many bad reviews is largely because the company in December 2021 had a rather large round of layoffs. This was a bit of a shell shock to a lot of us, and I personally lost people I considered friends in the layoffs. To add insult to injury the company then announced at the next all-hands that people in the C level exec team would, for the first time ever, receive bonuses. This gave the impression the exec team basically laid off a bunch of people so they could give themselves bonuses. I don't know the real truth of such decisions, but the let's be honest- it's a REAL bad look. The thing is: do you as a job seeker actually care? Is it really possible to find a sizable company in business for 10+ years that's never fired anyone? Does it matter to you if you work at a place where the execs get bonuses or not? I'm going to guess that it doesn't. So, with that out of the way, let me tell you what working here for 5 years has been like for me. It's been very positive honestly. I'm a tenured and senior programmer. I have a lot of autonomy to make decisions, architectural calls, and other core/fundamental implementation details critical to the day to day operation of the game team. The teams are all amazing on the game side. I'm serious. You'll like your colleagues a lot. Everyone is humble, hard working, down to earth, and extremely easy to get along with. I have worked on an incredible number of teams on the game throughout my long term here and every time the people you work with will be amazing. Rest assured. The vacation time, sick pay, flexibility, etc. are all very good. Some of the best I've seen at a Canadian company. In addition, speaking personally, my workload in recent years was very manageable. There were times many years ago where I had to crunch - and I mean real, real hard crunch. I haven't crunched in at least 3 years. The company doesn't want people to crunch. Lastly, I really don't think the company is a titanic. Revenue is looking steady. Things seem stable currently. We just release an early access version of a new English Learning game that has been extremely well received and the kids love it. The super crazy high growth years might finally be over but I really do think this is a stable company that isn't going anywhere.

Cons

- Salary pretty good for Canada but not really competitive globally. I think this is a big reason we're seeing so much churn. To be honest I do not envy the tight spot this has put Prodigy in. Their developer wages are pretty good for the historic (and in my opinion, underpaid) tech sector in the Toronto area. But now that all these bay area companies are going global and remote they think $200k USD for a developer is peanuts, Prodigy has a bit of a crisis on its hand. This leads to the next point - A lot of brain drain is happening right now. Call it "the great resignation" or whatever you want. I know churn everywhere is high. But The market right now is just insane. I know some people are leaving for 40 - 60% raises, who can blame them? I like working here but that's some serious cash. What this means for you, a job seeker, is two things. Firstly, you should come in demanding a high salary cause the company is desperate for talent. But secondly, you might need to get ready to explore certain codebases and systems on your own. There is no guarantee the domain expert of certain products or systems works there anymore. Documentation exists but can be sparse. - Bureaucracy. Make no mistakes - this company says it's a start up but you're entering a true blue corporation here. When you're over 450 employees, renting out the former Tim Hortons HQ in Oakville, and have been around for 11 years you aren't a startup anymore IMO. This isn't really a "con" it's just how it is. You aren't going to be cowboy running SQL scripts against a production database or any of that fly by night, need to get stuff running ASAP stuff that happens at a startup. Everything has a process. Processes are rigid. Sometimes things move slow. Sometimes you're allowed to twist the rules. It's a bit too process heavy for my tastes, but it's still not as bad as somewhere like Google, Oracle, IBM, etc. - Meetings. The company has recognized there's too many meetings. For what it's worth, on my team, there's been a good reduction and re-organizing of meetings. Our team moved meetings so they happen in chunks allows me a lot more blocks of free time to code. - Tech Debt. This is a huge one, especially if you'll be working on the Math Game. It's very old, there's a ton of technical debt and architectural issues that are not easy to fix. The company knows about them but getting time to solve the issues has been historically not something people are willing to do.

Prodigy Education Response

Thanks for taking the time to write such a comprehensive review. We do appreciate your thoughts and constructive feedback. Your summary of both the perks and challenges of working at Prodigy are quite accurate. We have amazing people, and we’re very proud to offer great flexibility and benefits. One point I would like to clarify is that the new incentive bonus you mentioned includes employees at many levels of the company – from senior individual contributors to execs. Today’s job market is unlike anything we’ve seen before, and, yes, it’s hard to keep up, especially with some US-based companies. In response, we have increased our salaries for critical roles for both new hires and current employees. As you’ve seen, we’re also addressing employee feedback by simplifying processes where we can and reducing time spent in meetings. Thanks for noting the technical improvements in our new Prodigy English game. Like all new products, this benefited from all our learnings over the last ten years from our Math game. Seeing these learnings lead to real improvements is always satisfying and can help justify overhauls to parts of the Math game. Continued improvement and investment are critical for us to keep building great experiences for students. As our company grows, we must evolve. We desire to hang on to the best of what we were when we were smaller while creating new norms that maintain our great working environment. While some things will change as we get bigger, we’re committed to fostering a great culture and forwarding our mission to help every student in the world love learning. Thanks for sticking with us for the ride!

I think it's good - Senior Game Developer Prodigy Education Employee Review

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