So many. Where to begin:
I was there for almost four years and while the first year was OK - I left because I got frustrated seeing the same cycles over and over again. Basically, they would have deep cuts, then hire a bunch of temps, fire a bunch of temps, hire more temps for less money, fire the temps, hire more temps for less money, etc. Of course, the quality of work went down with each cycle like this. At the end, when I left, they had taken a job that used to be done for about $30 and hour and required a degree to become one that paid $15 an hour an no degree. Same job. So you can imagine what the quality of work became.
Other things I saw there which made me deeply unhappy:
- offers rescinded - I literally saw signed contracts that were disregarded after the person had quit their job to come work for Scholastic. So, don't go work there if you have a good, stable job! No matter how much money they offer! Trust me: you don't want to get that call that starts "I have some bad news..."
- all the talk about the "Scholastic Family". It's not a family and that is a terrible analogy. Do you fire family members? No? Well, Scholastic employees get fired all the time. So it's not a family.
- nepotism. There was one job in my dept that 300 people applied for. Guess who got it. The barely literate kid of a VP. I wish I was kidding. I am not.
- incompetence is rewarded. I have never seen a better example of the Peter Principle. They put people who are not able to do their jobs into high up roles where they can do little damage. Example: my boss was completely incapable of project management. Then, when my bosses boss was looking at the metrics (by the way they love Excel here) they saw that our department was bleeding money. Guess who got in trouble. Not my boss, but me! Because I had not been "productive" enough. Tell me how I can be productive if my boss, who is my project manager, does not give me work and manage my hours. Should I have made up work for myself to do? This happened so many times when I was there and my boss never got fired so I quit.
- treatment of contractors. They pretend like they will hire you after a few months. Not gonna happen. I think I saw one contractor out of 75 get hired in my time there. So again, don't quit a full time job thinking they will convert you. Not gonna happen.
- incompetent IT dept. I know they are doing more with less, but it should not take two weeks to get an email address.
- office space. Luckily, where I was, the space was very nice but I have heard some other buildings are terrible.
- Christmas party. What a joke. They ran out of salmon after 20 minutes and it is so jam packed that you cannot even reach the buffet tables.
- Wastefulness. The lights and heat are left on 24/7 but good luck trying to get any office supplies. When I left, they did not even have basics like pens and paper in the supply closet. You had to bring your own from home. Also, a lot of wastefulness in projects. I worked on 100K projects that went nowhere and never got implemented. Yet, they were constantly laying people (oops, I mean Scholastic family members) off.
- New direction. They are trying, desperately, to launch their eReader, as the savior of the company. Good luck with that. And you will compete with Amazon how? Oh right. You haven't figured that part out yet!
