Pros
In the beginning things were great. I loved the company, the product, the people, and the organization. Granted there were challenges from the mothership that is Ascential but overall it was a great place to be. Very talented and dedicated people. Generous PTO, and Sick Leave, good 401k with matching, and truly felt like people mattered at the local level. During Covid all employees went remote and we received weekly video updates from the CEO of Ascential (Duncan Painter) on the state of the business. These felt mostly transparent and did provide good value and insight into the health of the company overall. Nice office space in SLC and very flexible WFH policies.
Cons
Ascential leadership in the UK is completely out of touch with the needs of local employees, especially considering the job market in the Salt Lake valley and surrounding areas. They would only approve job postings at below market average wages which severely limited the quality of new hires when we had asked for Senior level positions. Ascential has a very bad tendency to micromanage all of the local leadership to the point it becomes impossible to actually get anything done to improve the org. Was not uncommon for UK leaders to belittle and undermine decision made locally as it didn't fit with their "plan" that was never shared. The business would say they were going to implement new tools or products to help make things better and our lives easier. These projects would always end up in purgatory as priorities would constantly shift and budgets would be re-allocated to "more" important things. While all of the above is bad, it really was a good place to be as most of the time direct contact with Ascential corp was limited and we did have enough autonomy to actually get local work and projects done (mostly). Starting in Q1 2020 is when things really started to spiral out of control. Shortly prior to the Covid shutdowns some new tech leadership was implemented. Decisions made by this person completely changed how the tech group viewed the company and the local business. This leadership change proved to be micromanagement, condescending and back stabbing. Shortly after the business decided to "trim the fat" and laid off 3 or 4 people in tech. While not unneeded, it came at a terrible time and an even greater cost to morale in the teams. A few months after that a decisions was made again to off-shore 80% of the local work to India. Already running at a skeleton crew we then lost an additional 6 local employees, leaving the entire local team at 6 people. From those left standing, 2 more people left the org immediately after the announcement to go work elsewhere. At this point most of the remaining tech people saw the writing on the wall and all left within 2 months of each other. As of now, they have not started backfilling any local positions and most, if not all of the work is being offshore between India, Dublin, and London. Run. Run very far away and never look back.
