Illuminate Education Reviews

Pros

Illuminate is a company full of motivated people

Cons

I have no cons at this time.

Pros

There's a lot of promising initiatives on the Engineering side. Legacy code is slowly being rearchitected into a more microservices approach. The teams you work with are very close-knit, with a lot of collaboration happening across multiple product teams.

Cons

At the lead role levels, there are many areas of responsibility to cover due to the smaller team sizes. Multiple hats can be worn by the same person on the day to day as different timelines need to be met; and this is expected for Senior-level positions and higher. Prioritizing time for paying off tech debt against product timelines is tricky, resulting in slow-moving refactoring.

Pros

Illuminate Education has some great team members, but they are fast leaving the company. And wouldn't you want to leave also? They have periodic layoffs, the SLT always expounds on making money, and some products don't work together well.

Cons

You are expected to work whenever you are needed. There is no downtime, there are no weekends, there is no time off. While leaders want to what's right for their employees, the expectations to make money override everything.

Pros

Working remotely is a pro

Cons

Lazy leadership leads to poor decisions and tribalism from top to bottom. If you want to hide out and do nothing, no one will notice as long as you talk a big game and kiss the right butt. Working hard does nothing because no one will notice that either. Basically, you have a lot of people clinging onto the roles they held in their company before they were bought up by this one that are both inept at learning new things and terrified of being made redundant in the next round of layoffs. And there will be layoffs, they happen every time a new company is bought and usually amount to the exact same number of people that will be brought in the week after the cuts are made. So buddying up to your old pal and creating pacts/factions is really the only way to ensure surviving another day here. If you like playing “Survivor “ this is the place to be... You get all the back stabbing and manipulating that is normally only seen on tv. This is real life folks and the daily grind is to be under paid, and over looked.

Pros

Remote, Medical, 401k, colleagues, that's about it

Cons

Long hours, poor management, constant change (not for the better) , communication is terrible

Pros

On rare occasion there is some down time to breath.

Cons

You'll be expected to juggle multiple projects across multiple languages that have all been abandoned because the author's have all left/been cut.

Pros

- Flexible schedule (depending on your manager) - Casual dress (when offices were open) - Helpful team members (at least, in my case) - Health benefits aren't bad (although, they used to be 100% covered by the company)

Cons

- Mega-merger (5 companies into 1). This was more than this company could chew. I suppose it sounded like a wonderfully profitable idea on paper. Reality has been quite dismal. - Senior Leadership Team. The company used to be a nice split between employee-focused and client-focused, which in turn, drove profits up organically. Our big company meetings would show what cool things employees were doing (or going to do) followed by an inspirational pep talk by the original and genuinely excited CEO. Now we get talks about EBIDA and sales projections dictated to us by a not-so-genuine and uninspiring CEO and SLT. - Communication is a huge problem. Big changes that alter people's lives are dropped instantly and without warning. All under the guise of "strategic planning." The problem is every strategic plan seems to involve laying off employees. - And with that...lots of talent and product knowledge walking out the door. This makes everyone's job harder and takes time away from exciting new projects. - Developer jobs cut in favor of overseas hires. If you are applying to be a developer at this company, just know that your job could eventually find its way to India. - Pay is on the low side of average (especially for dev workload) - Clients (i.e. teachers and students) are the ones paying the price for these "strategic" decisions. That's what happens when your focus is on the money and not the product and people who build, sell, and implement it. - A once-great culture has been all but wiped out. They love to use the word. They love to say it out loud to try and convince people it exists. It doesn't. - This experience has proved to me that a hierarchal corporate structure isn't always the solution. We used to be a "flat organization." It was much better without borders. - Leadership used to care about what employees thought of them. Reviews didn't just run downhill. We were asked (frequently) to rate leaders. Now, all we have is Glassdoor and who knows if any of them even read this stuff.

Pros

Good home office atmosphere, great colleagues

Cons

Used to be a good company until all the tiers of management were added, and impossible deadlines with unrealistic goal-setting