Thriving in the fast lane - Program Manager Workera Employee Review

Great people Great product Great mission Great CEO

Ambiguity, which is expected at this stage of company

-Nice people! Everyone who was there a long time believed in the mission and vision. I went to multiple offsite events that were fun and functional because of the people. -The company had a high tolerance for change and very quickly pivoted when the market demanded it. Whether those pivots were successful was another thing. -I started pre-series A and had a lot of freedom early on to define my role. Work-life balance is only good if you REALLY enforce it for yourself, No one will enforce it for you, especially since communications and decisions are happening at all hours of the day with a global team. In general people at Workera were pretty good about understanding when someone didn't respond outside their working hours. -I got to help build Workera's proprietary assessment development platform with a delightful and extremely competent group of engineers. The process was long convoluted, but it was exciting and gratifying to see my wish list of requirements become a reality over the course of months and years. -Pay was good for my role

-SLT put a big emphasis on making things 'look' cutting edge, pretty, and minimally functional with little to no understanding of what it takes to create this on the backend. Both engineering and content teams were constantly at odds with SLT on this. -Later on, zero interest in correctly/responsibly doing assessment, even though that's supposedly what Workera is all about. Just before I left Workera, a colleague started a doomed initiative to inform SLT what 'validity' means in the context of measurement in the hopes that we could get some buy-in to slow down a little and improve the (poor, very poor) quality of our assessments. After a bit of lip service to validity, SLT blew this off. -The company laid off all psychometric staff in April 2024 and eliminated their positions entirely because someone in SLT had a half-baked idea for scoring that they did not properly communicate with any of the I/O / data science people left on staff. -There was huge pressure for assessment developers to "just generate" all assessment content at a rate where the content couldn't all be verified by a human to be accurate. We dealt with extremely poor morale and a lot of burnout because of the pressure to create content at an unsustainable volume and speed. -We hired assessment/learning developers exclusively from the Middle East and Asia as contract employees, solely for cost reasons. They were/are a delightful, highly educated, and whip-smart group of people who were criminally underpaid and 'othered' by the company in spite of many of them working there for 3+ years. In a conversation with HR about a potential renewal pay increase for one multi-year AD located in south Asia from around $18/hr to $20/hr, the HR person I was speaking with said that we hired this AD before we did benchmarking and realized that a comparable role in Bangladesh would only be making about $7.69 per hour, therefore we would never give this person a raise regardless of their merit since they are already being overpaid. This sort of business-over-people mentality began to appear around late 2023 and I just didn't like it. -More petty: an FTE who I supervised was laid off in a team restructure. I wasn't informed about it until after he'd already been laid off. I felt undermined as a manager and ashamed that I wasn't the one to break the news to him. This event was the beginning of the end for me at Workera, though it took me about 7 more months to actually resign. -There's a lot more to add here but it ultimately amounts to Workera's intense drive to change all the time to fit the demands of their clients without really thinking of whether they're making a product that is useful to any of the individuals who would be induced to use it.