IXL Learning Reviews

Cons

I have no cons it was a great job

Cons

-top down, uber corporate environment -unnatural dysfunctional communications within and across functions (no responses to questions, messages, emails etc unless it’s from a special CEO/COO direct line of interest; engineering doesn’t talk to product or marketing etc) -NO real strategy (they’re just coasting off the core business) -zero faith that their current leadership team is actually good at leading teams, people, and managing for growth (to quote someone else: senior leaders at IXL would not be hired ANYWHERE else for their roles and are utterly incompetent at core parts of what their JDs are; that’s also likely why they’ve all been at IXL for so long, no one else would hire them…) -don’t value expertise (CEO/COO dictate all, handful of leaders have been there for a while being their minions, and almost ALL ICs are extremely junior and inexperienced, perfect cogs in a wheel) -don’t value diversity -toxic culture where any disagreement results in layoff (any employees who ask questions or point out possible concerns get fired and then scapegoated for all problems) -not innovative (tech and product looks like its leadership team: dinosaurs from the oracle era) -pay is under market (pretend there is no equity when really it’s that they want to continue to bamboozle employees into believing it’s common to NOT disclose full details about compensation packages)

Cons

Don't feel valued as employees

Cons

"Micromanagement" is an understatement for the "leadership" team. They lack the capacity to trust their managers; every single hiring decision is subjected to random, uninformed whims of [redacted]; in fact, their entire hiring process seems to be designed to exclude experienced engineers with multiple options, which is very frustrating when you are trying to grow your team with anyone but new grads (and even they end up getting snatched up elsewhere, if they have a modicum of skill!) Extremely opaque expectations from management, product direction is chosen, again, at the apparent whims of the executive team, with little regard to product market fit, or data-driven strategy. Employees randomly moved onto new projects with no warning and insufficient ramp-up and knowledge transfer. A culture of fear dominates. Absolutely no regard is given to employee welfare by the executive team; for example, just a week before an entire team was laid off, that team was granted permission to extend an offer to a potential new hire (who ended up declining, thank goodness). Had he accepted, he would have quit his current job, gotten hired, and immediately laid off without severance. What kind of psychopath would do that to someone???

Cons

There is none that I can think of currently.

Cons

Managers, processes, onboarding, coaching, sales structure

Cons

There was some miscommunication about what our role was and what we were expected to do during down time

Cons

- The CEO and COO have ultimate decision making power (there is no board of directors), do not value diversity and inclusion at all, and organize the company so that people tackling similar problems can't connect with one another. - There is no feedback about the product in the form of user research or data (these teams don't exist at IXL). All decisions are made top down. No change is tested, it's all up to the senior leadership. - Any concerns raised by the staff or users are silenced and silo'd. They do not want to hear feedback, they just want you to fall in line and do your job. Every day, students who use IXL complain about it on their social media and the comments just get deleted. - If you get acquired by IXL, as now ~8 companies have, they will completely gut your company. They have no foresight when it comes to restructuring the companies they acquire, laying people off while having open job posting for their same role. When laying people off, they tried to get people to sign severance deals that misrepresented what they promised, offering the bare minimum but describing it as a great severance package.

Cons

I wanted to write this review because some of the reviews people have left in no way resemble the company as I've experienced it. For context, IXL acquires one or more companies a year, usually more it seems, and some of these companies are in bad shape. IXL early this year acquired TPT and laid off 100 people in order to save the company. It's sad these former employees who caused their company to be in such bad shape are lashing out.

Cons

The company has been growing really quickly, and I don’t want that to have a negative impact on the culture. We’re actively working on improving diversity, but I’m not sure we’re there yet.