Pros
Everyone is nice. I always say, if that's the first thing you use to describe a company, run, run far away. You can't get fired. But you can get laid off when the company realizes things aren't going well. You can do whatever you want. And the result is an awful product. We're not building a recipe app. But Prenda would probably be more profitable if it did.
Cons
In September 2021, there was layoffs of 30% of the company. I saw that Prenda is hiring again and saw that not a single person that was laid off has left a review. So I felt it was only appropriate to take some time out of my day to write this. The quickest summary I can give is the company is split between two groups: (PP) Product Professionals - Wicked smart individuals who come from amazing large companies, that have run their own side businesses and done other amazing things, want to disrupt education because it didn't help them get to where they are. (NPP) Not Product Professionals - People who don't know how to build a product but believe (and I quote) "that a divine power put me here to do this job", Stay at home parents who stumbled into their first job accidentally when Prenda blew up during Covid and wouldn't have a job otherwise, teachers that are unhappy with the education system (and want to avoid teaching things like evolution, critical race theory, etc.), friends and family, people that go to church together. The unfortunate thing is that the PP group is drowned out by the NPP group. NPP folks who should be fired are instead given more headcount. The NPP group runs wild building features without thinking how it fits into the larger goals of the company. The NPP group, driven by some kind of religious whatever, push to grow at alarming rates, while PP folks go "we cannot handle this growth." I watched questions get asked about things like "What are we doing about security with children's data" and the company would get all panicked and worked up about it, and then the next week some other fire would pop up and that question would be forgotten. The product org, had a chief experience officer running it who was mentally checked out for the entire time I was there. I heard that sometimes, his direct reports weren't even sure whether he'd be at the product org all hands meetings. The engineering organization, if you can even call it that is absolute chaos. A bunch of engineers that have never worked in a company at scale, running around with their heads chopped off. There is no organization, no leadership. There is the head of engineering, but he basically just found excuses not to show up to anything. In the entire time I was there, he didn't run a single engineering meeting (no architecture meeting, no all hands, no learning hour, no one on ones unless you asked him first). He did have the "good guys club" which I saw once on a calendar invite they referred to themselves as "the gang". Gross. This is honestly the tip of the iceberg with just how bad things are. If you're looking to check out mentally, do the bare minimum amount of work, and have nothing to show for it on your resume, this is perhaps the place to be. Otherwise, if you're looking to disrupt education go apply to Khan Academy or edX or literally anywhere else.