Sounded Like My Dream Job - Software Engineer Cengage Employee Review

2.0
31 Jan 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

-Excellent work environment -Laid back WFH rules and decent work-life balance -Free snacks in the kitchen, often with leftover pizza -Most peers were nice and easy to talk to

Cons

-The entire prior engineering team for my product was fired before arrival. Other team mates were just as new as me. -Job description emphasized modern stack, actual stack was very old, clunky and no plans to upgrade. Often brought up in meetings that the business wasn’t sure if they were investing in our team’s product. -Broken deployment pipeline, server team didn’t seem to have a disaster plan in place, Software was a ticking time bomb and wouldn’t debug locally (easily, that is) -Bulk of the work was SQL data entry and help desk style tickets. -Lack of resources behind the software we support due to lack of prior engineering team members. -The laid back WFH and work-life balance can come back to haunt you if you’re the one who is always on time to work. -On time attendance was heavily stressed for daily stand ups but never enforced.

Explore other reviews about Cengage

3.0
4 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Company has some interesting approaches to the market and in the past they seemed value employees. There are some good employees there and there was, in the past, visionary leadership, but the people with the vision and leadership skills left the company a few years ago.

Cons

The company actively de-values employees. They had a project they called "Project Horizon" where they told all employees they needed to cut costs, so the company was going to have multiple layoffs over 3-5 years - but nobody was allowed to know when, where, or why - - just one day large swaths of people would be gone. That hung over everyone's heads - for years, and is indicative of how Cengage values employees - it doesn't. Everything is about trying to secure new funding and prepare for an IPO, so they stopped investing significantly in the products about 3 years ago and that's about when they stopped acting like they cared about employee wellness as well.

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