Pros: The people here are, for the most part, absolutely wonderful. I loved my immediate team, and some of the nicest, most helpful people I've met in my career so far have been at Course Hero. This is Course Hero's strongest asset by far; the people here simply take care of one another. The culture here is extremely collaborative, and you will never feel isolated here. A very relaxed place with no hard deadlines. Despite being a startup, Course Hero is quite stable and profitable, so the company doesn't push people to the brink to get work done by a certain date. If you're looking for a place with work/life balance, Course Hero has it in spades. Your job here never feels at risk; there is no such thing as layoff given how well the company is doing. Solid compensation/perks package. Pay is respectable, the gas card/other transportation benefits are neat, and the on-campus gym is awesome. And yeah, free food 3 days a week with lots of leftovers because people WFH so much, haha. Lots of freedom as an engineer. The management here is purposefully very hands-off, and at least for me, the product managers and the designers make sure that you have a say in their pillars of the team and don't micromanage what you're doing. Like I said before, the culture here is very collaborative and this is a good place to become well-rounded as an engineer since you have the opportunity to work regularly with non-engineering fields. Flexible work hours. Board game nights. Video game setups.

Cons: High-level learning opportunities are few and far between from a hard skills standpoint. I was able to do a lot of self-driven learning at Course Hero due to the freedom there, so I'm happy that I learned to do a lot of things but unhappy that I didn't really learn how to do things right. This is because the company's software engineering workforce is VERY junior (the median age of a SWE at Course Hero is like 23), and it has had an incredibly hard time hiring senior engineers, especially those from top companies. There is simply nobody there to teach you how to build things responsibly and to scale. To this day, Course Hero hasn't made a single engineering hire from Facebook, Google, or a top-top startup like Airbnb/Pinterest; pretty much all the good senior talent there has been raised internally, which is awesome but not sustainable in my opinion for the long term. Because of the junior workforce mentioned above, the codebase and overall development environment is very, very messy and unstable. Architecture isn't really a thing at Course Hero, and there's hacks everywhere. People resolve a merge conflict by commenting out all the conflicting code. Everyone merges directly into 1 dev branch. Code review and QA are treated as afterthoughts for a lot of the company, which you can quickly and easily see by making the website bug out after slightly stepping outside of a happy flow. 3rd party libraries are used like crazy for expediency instead of taking the time to build stable, internal infrastructure. Even the wifi goes down for half the day to an entire day sometimes. The product roadmap is surprisingly conservative and unfocused for a startup. None of the roadmap features in my opinion were particularly ambitious, with some of them being carbon copies of existing products like Sparknotes. There are a LOT of product initiatives that the company is trying to add alongside its flagship documents product which accounts for like 90%+ of traffic and revenue. I loved how relaxed and pressure-free Course Hero was, but in my later days there, I definitely felt like it got too extreme. Some people were getting away with doing incredibly little there, which was very bad because a few of these people were at a senior level and setting a terrible example for the rest of the company. An official policy of 2 WFH days a week is too aggressive. The office was 50%+ empty every day during my last months there and felt like a ghost town. The org went from super flat from when I started to a middle management bloat nightmare. There are too many levels now, and as a result, change from a managerial perspective is slow and confusing. In my later time there, I had no idea what the upper management was planning for the company, and there were random new processes being dropped left and right for seemingly no reason. Like the upper management, I wanted the company's engineering workflow to be more clean and stable, but this wasn't the right way of going about it.

Pros: Nice people. Laid-back culture. Decent perks. Empathetic colleagues most times.

Cons: Very slim chances of an IPO. No talk of the same by execs. Whenever the question of an IPO comes up, it's shooed away. So, you just have base pay to survive on, which is getting incredibly difficult in these inflationary times. I don't know if it's a push from the top down or just too much emphasis on DEI; folks who are sweet talkers are promoted. With all kinds of metrics available, it's so easy these days for higher-ups to see who's actually working and who's faking it. It's a bad sign when people who talk too much without bringing anything to the table are promoted. This isn't Google, who can afford those kinds of folks. Too much attrition in the Product org and too many weak PMs. Hiring too many people too fast. There's not enough work for engineers due to a weak Product org and a lack of initiatives. The company can't afford top-tier talent yet managers want to hire more engineers so they can show "growth" and be promoted. Finally, the product itself. UI/UX sucks big time. The majority of students are complaining about the site being a scam. They lure students into a monthly subscription plan and then charge the whole year's amount upfront. In spite of a large number of complaints, they continue this practice, which gives a bad name to the company. In spite of investing heavily into branding, there are no results to show for it.

Pros: Decent work. Workload may vary.

Cons: Learning is restricted and needs to be employee-friendly in the organization.