don’t do it - Anonymous employee Scribe Employee Review

Scribe has the lowest salaries I’ve seen in publishing, an industry with already low pay (in 2021 they were hiring at $30,000). The “competitive time off” is laughable. You get the week off between Christmas and New Years, but this is a given across the board in the industry. Otherwise, the holidays are bare bones by publishing standards (no days off on MLK Day, Presidents’ Day, Juneteenth, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Veterans’ Day, or Christmas Eve). Vacation time and sick time are taken from the same pool, and you only get nine days total for your first year. You accrue one day per month, but you don’t earn any for your first three months because you’re on probation. When I was there, new hires and lower-level employees were required to come into the office (some every day), while almost all middle- and senior-level employees remained totally remote. The work-from-home policy was also enforced unevenly between offices. As other reviewers have mentioned, logging every minute of your work is suffocating. Each day you have to log eight hours on billable tasks with strict time estimates, always explaining yourself if you go over an estimate. The time system is a constant source of stress, no matter if you’re busy or short on work. The fact that Scribe bills clients for 1.2 hours per 1 hour logged by employees only makes things worse. Many employees seemed to work at least ten-hour days while only logging eight hours in order to meet estimates (and too much of this time is wasted leaving the required notes about your progress throughout the day). Also, don’t be tempted by promises to work on interesting academic books; a good portion of your tasks will be the kind of menial, repetitive work that gives you headaches and carpal tunnel. Scribe lacks the charm that typically comes with working in book publishing, with even lower than typical pay. The culture and office are soulless and sterile, and people hardly speak to one another—your work is simultaneously solitary and heavily surveilled. In almost all conversations with one member of the executive team, you’re either reprimanded or quizzed. This hostility pervades the whole company, and with some employees, his behavior borders on abuse and harassment (it’s shocking how much this is tolerated without any pushback even though everyone feels the same way about this person). In your first month or so, you spend almost all your time with this member of leadership. While I was at the company, over half of new hires quit during this initial period. Things get marginally better once you get to interact with other coworkers. There are some great, smart people who work here. Unfortunately, most of this positivity is drowned out by the tone set by leadership. I stayed as long as I did in hopes that things would improve, but the morale and treatment of workers only seemed to be deteriorating. It’s hard to understand why some employees have worked here as long as they have. If you are trans or nonbinary, I would be especially hesitant about working at Scribe. Upper management scoffed about preferred pronouns on multiple occasions (once in front of a new hire who was nonbinary—they quit the following day).