Pros
Being part of an education company inherently provides a sense of purpose. Stride has a long history of building excellent, cohesive, interactive educational content that is engaging for students. It feels great to be a part of that. The people who work there, especially on the curriculum side of things, are full of so much talent and so much heart. They love the idea of bringing content to life. Their enthusiasm makes them a joy to work with.
Cons
Decision makers forge ahead on decisions without sufficient requirement-gathering and without listening to concerns raised by those doing the work. This leads to confusion across stakeholders, projects routinely going over budget and/or underdelivering, and unrealistic workloads, Those folks end up feeling devalued and demoralized when, had they been listened to in the first place, avoidable inefficiencies could be averted. Leadership tends to overestimate current AI capabilities. They assume that AI is ready to do much more than it can at the moment and are sacrificing quality and consistency along the way. They reduce head counts and expect remaining folks to produce more with AI. So content quality and morale both suffer. This might improve as AI gets better, of course, but I anticipate leadership continuing to just expect more than is reasonable.
