Elsevier’s (research products/technology) ‘original sin’ in my opinion in that it delivers software requested by people who do not use the software. A university will make a purchase of based on a checklist of features that the product must do. This means as a developer you’ll be working on (you guessed it) checklists of features. If you’re prepared to switch off and churn out disjointed and poorly thought through features you’ll be fine - if you’re reading this a potential PM/dev who likes to build cohesive platforms and target user problems directly Elsevier really needs you but be prepared for a battle to change this mentality. I’ve felt at times that PMs/BAs/Management have all morphed into different kinds of delivery managers only interested in how long features will take to be released which can be unpleasant if you want to build quality products.
People internally often say Elsevier is a product driven company - that’s actually not quite the case in my opinion. It's actually Product Driven’s evil twin - a Sales driven company. Product development routinely works back from customer requests to the sales team - this means products can be littered with weird one-off requests and disjointed systems making organising projects difficult leading to tech debt and frustratingly slow pace of development
Advancement in the company is too slow and good employees will get better offers from competitors in the time it takes Elsevier to do promotions. Essentially the company has a bit of a small town mentality in how it operates which isn’t appropriate for markets as competitive for labour as London and Amsterdam
