Pros
A good place to cut one's teeth. When it was truly a mid-sized family-run corporation, Scholastic actually cared about its employees. The pay used to be decent and there were no permalancers (this was a long time ago). There was demonstrable loyalty to long-time employees who did good work, and there were ample rewards for a job well done. Products and services were well-loved by our customers and the company was cutting edge.
Cons
Ruthless cultural changes after the move to SoHo. They went public and got too corporate, while remaining a nepotistic family business, rife with favoritism and special back-room deals. I worked my butt off for them, with no overtime, often forgoing vacations at my boss's behest in one department. After a decade of nothing but good performance reviews and several promotions, I lost my job in a big departmental purge and was treated like total crap for a year prior to that, especially after they fired my boss. Essentially they tried to torture us all out, then stopped giving us work, then fired us for not doing a good job when indeed we had no job. Then after the dirty deed was done, they dumped the person they hired to fire us. This kind of thing became typical at "the company you grew up with." It was like a cult, or the Mafia. Or, sadly, today's cutthroat corporate America. Especially sad when it had been a wonderful place to work for so long.
