Good work-life balance and benefits, but poor management overshadows the perks - Anonymous employee Common Sense Media Employee Review

A nonprofit that is adopting new technology to scale their progress against the major issues their family/teacher constituency is facing. Incredible mission -- super relevant in an age when technology and media are speeding up around our kids. Kind and thoughtful management and openness to thinking through new approaches to old challenges.

Occasionally, consensus-driven culture can slow down decision-making (but that is not always a bad thing!)

I've struggled for a nearly year to find the right words to write this review. I worked for Common Sense Media for over a decade. I saw it at its best and at its worst. Back around 2015, there was a strong spirit of collegiality and collaboration. The org president would sign off emails with "better together" (one of the org values) and it really felt like everyone was working together without ego to create high quality content. Throughout my full time at Common Sense, my coworkers were passionate, vibrant, engaged, and a delight to work with. The digital citizenship curriculum appears to do good in the world, training kids to be safe, ethical, and responsible online. (The media reviews are a more mixed-bag and may be used by conservative groups to actively ban books and promote censorship, particularly of LGBTQ+ people.)

The senior leadership has contributed to a much more negative culture over time. There were somewhere on the order of 5 rounds of "layoffs" that I'm aware of, and in many cases, leadership hired new people to fill essentially the same roles shortly later. In some cases, the people who were laid off were high performers whose business functions were determined to be no longer necessary, but then after they were gone, their responsibilities still had to be done, and new roles re-establishing the same business functions opened up half a year later. In other cases, the management used "layoffs" to get rid of people who disagreed with them and rehired for essentially the same roles nearly immediately. This management approach gave myself and many of my coworkers a deep fear that we might randomly lose our jobs if we approached leadership with any data that contradicted their preconceived notions. Senior leadership would often mention a tight budget, but they did not appear to think this applies to themselves. Historically, Common Sense has given a cost of living increase of 3% per year to its employees. In 2021, employees were told that no one received salary increases because of a tight financial year, but the org's Form 990s (publicly available a few years later) indicate that senior leadership did still give themselves salary increases, averaging 4.8%. Ashwin Sridhar, the current CTO/CPO, contributes to a particular culture of toxicity. He decided when first joining and before seeing any data that the way to grow membership was to build a parenting advice chatbot app. He consistently ignored data indicating that this would not work. But far worse, he intentionally siloed data, mandating that anything that contradicted his vision not be shared with other senior leaders. He has promoted the idea to stakeholders that he is bringing a new data-focused approach to the org, while deliberately silencing voices who have actual data (from surveys, analytics, user interviews, and more). I have seen Ashwin tell one group of stakeholders one thing, and then a day later tell other stakeholders the opposite, trying to get everyone on board with his vision. This intentional repression of data while simultaneously claiming to be the person who is revamping the org to be more data-driven is a self-interested political play that does not serve the larger needs of the org or it's users. I once told the President Ellen Pack that Ashwin was putting me in the position of either doing my job right (collecting data and sharing it with the people who need it) or else risking Ashwin getting rid of me. Ellen said to keep doing my job right, and not to worry. Half a year later, Ashwin laid off me along with half a dozen other people, effectively silencing anyone who had raised any concerns about his approaches to kids' privacy, data privacy, or his pet chatbot project.