Aggressive scale requirements and pressure from investors = burnout working environment with high turnover.
Pros
Great lateral teammates and lively and fun work environs. Have met some of the most dedicated and hardworking people at GA. Idealism among colleagues is very inspiring. Highly networked role - meet the startup/design/tech movers and shakers in your community! Very public facing: you can become highly visible in your city, great for personal branding. CEO and founding team are inspiring leaders and often in the press. Strong PR means GA is always in the news. Great internal event database and tech driving the website, customer acquisition. Digital team knows what they are doing. Excellent back end system and very responsive PM. Strong digital marketing means high consumer exposure in GA campus cities. Lots of people aware of company and this makes job easier (and comes with pride).
Cons
Lean local team model means way too much to manage for low comp. Leverages social mission against your salary - pays nonprofit salaries for what would be lucrative gigs elsewhere for the amount of revenue you are generating and how much work one does. Inflated central team budget and scattered product strategy mean lots of staff at HQ producing subpar stuff. Almost all online school products are embarrassing to sell. Promotions based mostly on politics and loyalty, not talent. A few talented City Directors thrive and inspire, but most middle management an uninspiring and mediocre lot -- how these people get promoted is beyond comprehension. Dependence on statistics and data stifles creativity and intuition - expect to report endlessly on every last bit of anything. If you enjoy being a grunt and love spreadsheets you will love GA. Poor localization in foreign markets due to dependence on selling to an American millennial audience which doesn't translate well outside USA. Non New York and SF markets get little love from HQ. Global pricing model might make sense on paper but makes no sense IRL. Courses should not be charged in line with salary expectations in each city, not a one-size-fits-all model. (Web developers are only sexy in the USA because of media attention on Silicon Valley and Zuck--unfortunately this isn't the case everywhere!) Continual overestimation of targets leads to low morale. Expect to get denied vacation because you "need to be on campus" or because "we didn't make targets this quarter." Oh well, at least you get to spend time with your mates from the office. Contract workers like instructors paid late or not at all. Expense reports often late. Accounting department is a mess. Expect to go out of pocket often and deeply. Sales contests led with monetary rewards despite tonnes of psych/cogsci studies stating monetary rewards only lead to short term gains. For a couple of Ivy League founders this should be obvious and these idiotic contests should be discouraged. Big exodus of 1+year key employees lately from the C-Suite to the ground level. Frustration with company and its rapid scale have led to systematic employee dissatisfaction. High turnover, seems like most work one year or less before they quit. I am not the only one planning a move.
