Course Hero

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.

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.

Encourage senior engineers there to take a long break from doing hard tech to craft legitimate training materials for new hires. This is especially relevant given the very junior nature of your software engineering workforce. Teach code review. Teach QA. Teach version control. Teach architecture. Teach code review. And did I mention teach code review?

Splash the cash for engineers from top companies to help scale maturely and responsibly. You guys definitely have it, why not use it?

Senior management needs to be FAR more transparent. Feedback is a gift; ask for it constantly.

Interview process needs to be harder from a technical standpoint. Keep killing it with the culture fit portion though.

Bring back office hour recommendations and make the WFH policy less lax and more nuanced. Invest in commuter benefits. I can understand the WFH policy as a short-term hack to get talent commuting from far away, but in the end, people are by far the most efficient when they're right next to each other.