Great people, good salary, sub-par organization - Devops Engineer Elsevier Employee Review

3.0
11 Dec 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Everyone is really nice and helpful. People care about their work and want to improve. Lots of focus on diversity. You get a really big technology sandbox to play in. You can choose your level of involvement: dive into difficult problems, or coast. There's all sorts of products in different industries to work on. Lots of freedom for horizontal movement within the organization, and plenty of room to grow in your career. Internal promotions are common. Compensation isn't fantastic but it isn't terrible either. Benefits are okay. Pre-pandemic, a few office perks. Lots of internal resource groups, volunteering, development days, etc. Opportunity to work on something that matters to you. Currently tons of job vacancies to move into/between. Moving into lots of new markets so lots of opportunity for growth and to gain experience build something up from scratch. Great place for a first step in a career or to upskill or grow your career. Beginning to be more open to flexible work. Not forcing people to go into office during pandemic.

Cons

I think the word "disorganized" sums up the whole company. With the amount of profit they have you would think they would invest more in improving the organization, but it's the opposite. They reliably make obscene amounts of profit, so I guess there is no incentive to improve, as there is no need to work hard to compete or increase profit. Lots of things are wasteful, inefficient, duplicated, poorly communicated, confusing, disorganized. Often they can't staff needed positions or pay for needed services, seemingly because of bizarre internal accounting rules, and managers seem to twist into pretzels to maybe make a deal to get people they need to do critical work. Silos everywhere, reinventing-the-wheel everywhere. Training includes the bare minimum needed to protect the company/executives, but often people barely know how to do their jobs, and aren't taught to do them uniformly (virtually identical groups across departments do things very differently). Engineers don't get onboarded to the hundred-plus standards they are required to follow. It takes years to accomplish a menial improvement that a medium-sized company could probably do in a few weeks or months. Acquisitions are getting better, but are mostly inconsistent with no real effort to onboard thoroughly.l. IT is pitiful; wait weeks to get your laptop after you start, poor desktop management / software rollouts, they still do password rotations (?!), they don't do developer-specific support even though devs make up a large percentage of the employees. The company basically seems like a machine that prints money and buys companies without caring what the result is (they don't seem to have a plan for what to do with the companies they buy). Business units' divisions work against each other and C-level doesn't seem to care (or at least isn't stopping it). Products have virtually no consistency other than all using the same hosting provider and the same marketing logos/themes. Very little code re-use or collaboration. The products that do make money are mainly legacy tire-fires staffed by people with no interest or need to improve (it's making money, why fix it?). A lot is propped up by pockets of amazing but overworked, overstressed staff. People don't take vacation or improvement days because they're afraid they will be even more behind on work than before. A good amount of employees are unskilled, redundant. Lots of contractors, treated like second-class citizens even if they put in better or more work than full-time employees. When employees bring up concerns in town halls, management doesn't commit to specific improvement or change. Ideas are ignored unless submitted as a business case. Finding, storing, retrieving information is haphazard. I think someone read Conway's Law and decided to build a company around it. The best people seem to leave within a year or two out of frustration.

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5.0
11 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Industry leader Great benefits Incentive trips Invests heavily in its employees

Cons

Processes can be burdensome and clunky at times

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Elsevier Response
3w
Thank you for this balanced and thoughtful review. We're glad to hear that our benefits and investment in people are making a positive impact, those are commitments we take seriously. On the process feedback: Leadership is actively reviewing operational workflows, and the advice to listen more closely to employee feedback is something we're holding ourselves accountable to. If you're open to it, we'd encourage you to bring specific examples forward through your team or people and culture contacts. Change is most effective when it's grounded in the real experiences of the people doing the work, and that means you. Feel free to reach out to us at elseviergdrev@elsevier.com to provide more information Thank you for staying engaged and for caring enough to share this. It matters.
4.0
9 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Every direct manager I've had has been excellent: supportive, positive, and trusting me to deliver good work instead of micromanaging. Employees tend to stay, which suggests stability even if not everyone gets promotions or significant raises.

Cons

The pressure to outsource as much as possible, which is common at every publisher, leads to frustration. Because promotions or significant raises seem to be rare, you may be stuck in neutral unless you're very openly ambitious.

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