Pros
- Passionate, hard-working, and talented individual contributor teammates - In spite of the flaws, there is a positive impact on the world from the work - If you get a good team and manager, your life at KA can be mostly ok - A select few members of the Leadership team are wonderful and fight hard for employees - Work-life balance can be good if you take advantage of the unlimited PTO
Cons
- You are expected to give to the company, but the company does not give back to you - Everything good in the job description was started and is run by ICs without company involvement or support (e.g. game nights & social events, affinity groups, career development, etc) - Absolutely toxic culture of positivity - Employees are regularly retaliated against for asking questions, even if it is within their role to do so - People are afraid for their jobs, especially as they watch co-workers get pushed out or outright laid off - While leadership and management say they care about DEI, they aren't willing to do anything tangible to support it and instead focus on "plans for a plan for a plan on a page" - Folks with marginalized and underrepresented identities at the company experience more retaliation, less job growth, and a far higher turn over than than those from non-marginalized groups - Several instances of benefits being rolled back or scaled down, but not for financial reasons as we continue to hear how healthy the company's reserves are - Turn-over is extremely high, and some in leadership actively push people out the door who they don't like - There is no acknowledgement or discussion about the high turn-over, nor the reality of it's impact on morale, either from Leadership or from Management - Extremely few people that leave the company come back because once they've been here they know exactly how awful it is - Engineering is bloated and way over-staffed for the size of the site and the company - The waterfall process for planning-design-development is counter-productive and isolates teams and roles - Non-engineering teams are treated like second-class citizens at the company, even though we're a learning organization - Our teachers (whom we call content-creators like they are YouTube personalities and not actual teachers) are underpaid, overworked, and not-respected - CEO continues to drive the company in bad directions while alienating our teachers as he steps on their work and disrespects their abilities - Our current company direction will never meet our ambitious mission. Not in 100 years - Every single year is a major strategy shift and long term goals will never be met because they never last more than a year - As an organization we put being liked by the public over actually doing anything good or impactful, even going so far as to not announce or share changes which impact our users - There is absolutely zero transparency into decision making at the company. Or any transparency of any kind internally or externally - The relationship between ICs and leadership is toxic and neither side has any faith or trust in the other, which regularly leads to confrontations and blow-ups - There is no management culture. Managers are unsupported and it leads to a lot of awful management practices and decision which hurt ICs and their careers Overall this place is toxic and it kills the spirit of good, passionate people again and again.