Coursera Employee Reviews about "growing pains"

Pros

- Mission: You are genuinely changing people's lives for the better everyday by working on this product - Peers: Supportive and trusting culture amongst peers. Of course people might have different opinions on tactics and ideas, but we all want what is best for our learners and partners education institutions, so we trust each others' motivations. Everyone is incredibly impressive and accomplished; I'm proud and honored to work amongst these bright folks. - Leadership: Leadership is inspired and inspiring. Also, I actually *like* them all as people; they are all *good* people. (No evil jerks like I've seen before at other startups.) I think they all complement each other well. I enjoy our weekly All Hands meeting where we can ask them any question we want and they have to answer. - Office Environment: Clean, large office with plenty of meeting spaces. Fun work environment with lots of creative Coursera-related decor. Lunch, dinner, snacks provided. Gym on site. Lots of fun activities like Monday Beer Club, Wednesday Supper Club, Friday Happy Hour, Talent Shows, office garden, Food Truck Thursdays, karaoke, "Show and Tell" Mondays (where people can give 5 min presos on something Coursera related or something totally random and cool), Tech Talk Tuesdays, international candy wall, etc. - Salary structure is what I find ideal: They hire people they expect that, in another organization, would receive their performance-based bonus every quarter on top of a base salary. Therefore you earn an annual salary that is reflective of a competitive "base", and then they add on what you might get from another organization as your performance-based bonus as your *total salary*. No performance-based bonuses; you get money no matter what as part of a *larger salary*. I think this makes the work culture have less pressure to fit goals made in the beginning of the quarter that always end up changing anyway! Hitting your goals is about personal fulfillment, supporting your team, and supporting the learners. If you aren't a top performer, you are letting more people down than yourself. - Product: Exciting product moves to the "on-demand" and more flexible style of learning for courses. Only edtech company with an Android app. - PR/Press/Marketing: Overall the press likes us and is supportive of our mission. We're still a "hot" startup, but there's recognized long-term potential from the media. It is easy to market a product one really believes in. - Community: Users (i.e., learners) love us and appreciate us, and they are vocal about letting us know this everyday. - Time-off: Unlimited PTO–FOR REAL. I've worked in offices with "Unlimited PTO" and they made me feel guilty every time I took off. Here managers encourage people to take the time they need, and people really use it as they need it. - WFH: They are also pretty friendly about letting people WFH on Wednesdays (during "No Meeting Wednesdays") and are flexible in letting you work within the hours that fit your working style best (all dependent on your teams and projects, as expected.)

Cons

- Startup growing pains and figuring out how to best keep everyone in the loop on accomplishments and future plans for each team, particularly with new leadership. This is getting better as we stabilize team structures. - Product Team is either extremely junior or extremely senior, but we are currently hiring to fill the gap. - It's in Mountain View... waaah waaahhhh... but it's only a 15 walk from the Mountain View Caltrain station. - Although we are the leading edtech website, we're still figuring out the ideal monetization strategies for long-term profitability. But this is getting better and we have teams dedicated to figuring it out. Not too concerned right now as we have funding.

Pros

Good company mission and the work you do you feel makes a difference to the Learners. Great smart people to work around. Good for employees looking to work hard and are driven, but you have to sacrifice mental health and work life balance to get the results needed from you. Used to be an amazing place to work on all aspects of the organization, and defiantly still is on most other parts of the organization and certain teams.

Cons

-Culture change throughout the product organization could be partly due to COVID, disconnect from upper management and lower, and growing pains. -Leadership hiring choices in the recent year has caused turmoil and demotivation amongst employees especially on the product design organization were it has been messy, and employees have very little or no influence. -There is lack of support from middle management, don't expect job security as if you are not performing by the book or if management doesn't like you for any particular reason, not much reason needs to be given to remove you without much support. Like most companies you are replaceable. -There is no longer a work life balance as before with the expectation to work like a machine. I have seen people work to the point of tears, but that just feeds the machine. -You do get unlimited time off with no time to actually use it along with talks about taking mental health seriously, you can consider it lip service.