Living on former glories - Anonymous employee HighWire Employee Review

The company is pursuing an exciting innovation path. We have been leading from a platform innovation perspective and are now pushing into some very exciting innovations for the next few years.

Get the message out louder....we are doing some exciting things for the publishing community and our innovative capability is exciting.

HighWire Press always was and still is a fairly typical Silicon Valley tech sweatshop, better than some, worse than others. What set it apart was that it was a non-profit which was a department of Stanford. It was great to be part of a world-class academic institution and Stanford had phenomenal benefits. HighWire also hired many extraordinarily smart people. While always chaotic, there was an all-for-one attitude for many years.

New executive management was brought in 3 years ago who executed brutal layoffs and constantly changed their strategy. Many of the best people were either layed off or quit when the managerial culture became so toxic. Workloads became enormous and people squabled to get get work off of their plate and onto somebody else's. Much of the work was off-shored to India with very mixed results. Things improved somewhat over the past year due to process improvements. The core technology is an antique, despite efforts to freshen it up around the edges. HighWire has recently been spun-off from Stanford as a privately held, for-profit corporation, so all of the benefits of being associated with Stanford have evaporated.