A company that gets a lot right but has some real issues
Pros
- IXL makes a phenomenal educational product with a high quality standard that addresses an obvious need. Most employees genuinely believe in the product -- I'd use it with my kids without hesitation. - On the whole, my coworkers were bright, talented, friendly, and motivated by the company's mission. - I had (mostly) good managers who were talented and invested in my success. - Despite the cons listed below, I always got the sense that company was well intentioned. IXL operates in a thoughtful manner, and they were generally willing to acknowledge issues and address them with initiatives like management trainings and town halls. - Work life balance was good. - The company draws people from diverse academic backgrounds, which creates a unique pool of employees. - Women are overrepresented in management roles compared to most tech companies. - Day-in day-out I had a lot of fun working there (both due to the office atmosphere and company sponsored events), and I don't think the importance of that can be overstated.
Cons
- Whether it was fair or not, I got the sense that a majority of IXL employees didn't feel fully empowered in their roles. Most employees are hired to execute IXL's vision, not to define it. - Roles are narrowly defined and many have repetitive responsibilities. Cross-team internal mobility is rare, which exacerbates this problem. This model might work well for some, but it wasn't ideal for me, and I found growth difficult. - Decision making power is heavily concentrated at the top of the org chart. The CEO & COO are still very active in all facets of the product & company operations. It's possible to earn enough trust to have a say in major decisions, but for most that's a very long process. To be fair, the CEO & COO have a strong feel for the product and its users, and other people who earn decision making power usually are the highest performers. - Concentrated decision making would be more OK (I doubt any successful companies use consensus decision making as a long term strategy) if the strategy-level decisions were more frequently good ones. Despite the CEO's track record as a 'visionary' in the space (it's admittedly very good), recent decisions have been more miss than hit. - The company is slow moving. This is in part because the quality standard is so high, which is a good thing, but it takes a long time to get to obvious features, and smaller teams in the space are moving at a faster pace, which gives me doubts about the company maintaining its level of success long term. - The CEO's management policy could be described as "my door is always open, but I'm not going to be the one to walk through it". The longer I was at the company, the more I get the sense that he was out of touch with the culture / problems on the ground. - HR was kind of a mess and difficult to work with. - Given the timing and content of a lot of the reviews here, I am strongly suspicious that many of them are fake. A lot of fluff reviews appear after bad ones, and most of the people I knew at IXL would have more insightful pros/cons than the benefits (they're fine but hardly notable -- average to slightly below average for the area depending on the role) and vague notions of 'growing pains'. If those suspicions are true (again, no hard evidence), that's a disservice to potential candidates because it buries valuable opinion with misleading information, and I find that personally insulting.
