I also felt that my potential would never be expressed in the company because - despite a perfect record of exceeding performance goals for 14 quarters in a row and going above and beyond my job title to lay foundations for infrastructure and processes still in use today - I still received mediocre performance reviews (e.g. At some point, title absolutely does matter - it describes the relationships between employees - and title will be the difference between the same exact conversation being appropriate or not. In the end, though, I learned that the saying "title doesn't matter" is only partially true. I stayed on and decided I would use the opportunity to learn about and practice leadership (from any role) and collaboration. Just like in any company, there is a balance between contributing to a group identity and retaining your own individual one.
NO RED INK PROFESSIONAL
I considered leaving early on, but felt very torn between having a positive attitude and being a great teammate (in any capacity) - and being recognized for my professional skills and experience. Intentional or not, at times I definitely felt stifled. (My reference can attest to this story, since she was asked about how I would perform as a manager prior to my joining the company.) Instead, I was treated like a junior employee, and my greatest contributions to the team were funneled through other people. I was told in my interview explicitly that teammates would report to me, have 1:1s, and escalate questions to me. My interpretation of this pattern is that young professionals can put trust in NoRedInk, but NoRedInk has great difficulty in trusting seasoned employees and capitalizing on their experiences.Ī number of senior members mentioned to me on their way out that they never did the jobs they were hired to do, and I experienced this as well. In my time at NoRedInk, I saw impressionable, young employees do well, but I also saw seasoned professionals run through a revolving door as their expertise was denied time and time again. * The friendliness and warm sentiments are nice while they last, but you will be kicked to the curb just as hard and with just as little regret as with any other tech start-up when it's time to make a business decision.Īt the same time, the company's unwavering focus on doing specific things in specific ways translates to a shade of distrust in the culture.
Content and product features that were finished in two weeks and stopped achieving any notable improvements in testing after another two weeks will languish in review and retro purgatory for another six months before they go out. * Endless quality control, takes the idea of diminishing returns to a laughable extreme. Former teachers are often roped into accepting subpar compensation and dead-end positions because they're grateful to escape the comparatively brutal conditions of school employment.
Wherever you're hired at, that's where you will remain until you leave or you are laid off. * There is no autonomy and no career growth. * Leadership spends a lot of time staging communications with the company, hammering on their open-door policies, but will hit the company with out-of-left-field announcements.
There is a lot of time wasted asking employees to come up with a steady stream of new ideas, which are never implemented, because a path was already decided among the four or five people who actually have the power of initiative in a closed meeting. * Leadership is rigid, and the small number of executive decision makers are all-powerful. NoRedInk is a good place to go if you want to make that pivot, but don't think you're being fairly compensated in comparison with workers at similar tech companies aiming at different markets.
NO RED INK CODE
* Compensation is not competitive with other tech companies, though it's better than what a grad student, teacher, education administrator, or code academy graduate will be used to making, and so seems attractive to a lot of hires coming out of those points of career transition.
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