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General Assembly

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General Assembly Reviews

3.5

34% would recommend to a friend

(624 total reviews)

Daniele Grassi

43% approve of CEO

25% positive business outlook

General Assembly has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 624 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The General Assembly employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Education industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

624 reviews
1.0
Nov 5, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Great mission - Really nice people - Dog-friendly

Cons

I don't even know where to begin. The place is just so disorganized and morale is really low as a result. It's just a mess. I am very suspicious about all these positive reviews here. I would never recommend anyone to work here. - I have no confidence in the leadership team. All of them just quit in the blink of an eye and we had to wait months to know what was going on. The new leaders are just ALL talk. Old ones were about the same too. I don't believe one word they say. They love talking the talk but not walking the walk. - It's not a fun place to be an engineer or a product manager. Not a great place to advance your career. The systems really suck! 5,000,000,000 internal apps and most of them try to reinvent the wheel. They are terrible to work on as the processes are not all standardized. Leadership has no plan to deal with them...they just expect teams to keep doing patchwork. Also, engineers and managers end up doing a lot of manual work that has no business being done by them. Makes doing any and everything very slow. - They made a decision to hire different types of engineers QA, Dev Ops and Drupal had a huge plan for them to make a host of much-needed enhancements. Then the previous leaders left and the new leaders fired these engineers and Started a new team. - The CEO is always in hiding and when he does make an appearance he makes very problematic comments. I guess that's why he is in hiding and no one seems to like him. - HR is an absolute waste of time and a nightmare. Have an issue? Forget it. You will be more stressed out after going to HR. They do not support the employees. Especially minority groups. - Technical product managers are the most unhappy in the company. They score very low on how they feel about their work which is super sad. - The teams are always changing names just feels like a huge distraction, smoke and mirrors. Every quarter there is a new team with a new name. Enough already! - Compensation isn't great and they say they support pay equity in public but behind closed doors, they say completely different things. Also, HR is very defensive when it comes to this and very unwilling to budge. - They love to market themselves as this progressive company for the PR benefits but don't want to make the actual changes. - Seemed like a select few were getting promotions every 3 months. Then HR will tell you that they have a STRICT 14-month raise and promotion cycle. It's all smoke and mirrors. It amazes me how so many people stay for so long. I hope many of them are looking to get out because they deserve better.

1.0
Mar 19, 2018

Instructor

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I fully support the mission and goal of helping people to augment and even transform their current skillsets and careers. For the most part, students are enthusiastic and engaged. You get the opportunity to meet a lot of people.

Cons

HQ is in NYC. People working in NY live in a utopian bubble. Leadership are all located in NY and are completely disengaged from all other campuses. The lack of care for the actual student AND instructor experience is astounding. Turn over is through the roof. People join not knowing what they’re getting themselves into. Especially if they join because they love education roles. This place will chew you up and spit you out. You feel like a fraud working somewhere that’s blatantly posting false claims of 99% of grads finding jobs within 3 months. Complete and utter lies. Students join, then realize the truth but no one speaks about it. They skew the results in their favour, “this grad decided not to work in development after all”, “this grad went on vacation after their cohort” etc etc. Because they weren’t seeking employment “actively”, they’re discounted from our stats. Jake is a loose canon. I’m surprised he doesn’t have a handler yet. Completely unprofessional at every meeting I’ve seen him at. They’re more focused on IPOing so austerity measures are put in place, since this place is struggling to be profitable. Sacrificing student experience and playing on instructor’s good will is how they’re keeping their campuses afloat. Look, if you’re a developer, enjoy teaching, and are looking for a quick pit stop between jobs, work here for a term or two. No one stays long here for a reason. They don’t actually care about their products, their students, or any outcomes. They often like to shift blame on the admin staff at all the campuses when outcomes don’t align with what they’re hoping for. Immature leadership. Low team morale. Bad student outcomes. Good luck.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 624 Reviews

Glassdoor has 903 General Assembly reviews submitted anonymously by General Assembly employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if General Assembly is right for you.