Sounded Like My Dream Job - Software Engineer Cengage Employee Review

2.0
Jan 31, 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

5.0
Mar 28, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Total rewards, time off, great people and culture

Cons

Lots of changes and uncertainty at times

1.0
Jul 13, 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The individuals below the management level are good people, with some good people at management but C-Suite is horrible.

Cons

C-Suite hides their plans under corporate speak. Cengage was a family owned private company and they sold and ever since then has had, debt, schemes to shuffle and restructure debt while implementing RIFs after RIFs after RIFs...never ending and amazingly has been in increased this last year. From their actions it's outsource as much as you can of company operations and squeeze value from Intellectual Property. Look how many times they've renamed themselves. They had a CTO join for about a month or two until she realized it was a role with no team, no authority and left. The CEO is amazing at spin, you hear "great, great, great" corporate speak as the reality on the ground is "this failed, that failed..what!? they're gone!...what they moved that department offshore!...what!? that department is now a vendor relationship...oh we're not DEI focused because the wind changed". The trend is contraction not expansion, no ground breaking innovation. My jaded view from college on expensive books has only grew since I see how the sausage is made.

2
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