• Poor leadership
• Lack of diversity
• Underhanded business practices
• Few opportunities for employee growth
• Low and declining salaries compared to industry standard
• Increasing responsibilities on individual workers as they shrink the overall workforce
• Morally bankrupt CEO
While Scribd offers comprehensive benefits and has hired a strong team of rank-and-file workers, its insipid, gutless leadership and underhanded business practices are what stand out most from my tenure at the company.
Shady Business Practices:
Under Scribd's current subscription model, the product routinely limits access to popular content for high-volume users in an effort to lower content costs. The company is almost entirely opaque with users about why their access is being restricted and only started to acknowledge the restrictions when users complained en-masse about the practice and the lack of transparency around it. The recent rebrand as 'Everand', the new audiobook and ebook brand, was in part an effort to distance the product from the slew of negative reviews and perceptions now associated with the Scribd name because of this practice. Plans to introduce usage-based fees on top of subscription fees are in the works, and it will be interesting to see how tenured and voracious users react.
At present around 50% of Scribd's profit is derived from recurring charges on 'sleepy subs' AKA users who are not actively engaging with the service and are assumed to have forgotten they're subscribed. While steps are slowly and reluctantly being made towards easier cancellation, a Scribd subscription is notoriously difficult to cancel because the company relies so heavily on the revenue generated by these users. The company intentionally declined to notify these unengaged subscribers about the launch of Everand with the consideration that such notifications might remind them of their existing subscriptions, potentially leading to cancellations.
Shoddy Leadership:
Scribd has been a 'startup' for 16+ years and has been misleading employees and potential hires about an upcoming IPO that has been '12 months away' for the last 8 years. Senior leadership frequently shares positive forecasts with employees, yet repeatedly fails to fulfill these projections.
In terms of priorities, leadership routinely ignores the long-standing problems with the platform and instead chooses to chase flavor-of-the-month trends in tech. Why invest in improving the ever-skipping, never-syncing audio player when you could put all your resources into creating an AI librarian?
Overall, there's a notable reluctance among leadership to accept responsibility for the company's setbacks, which are often the result of their own questionable decisions or of them declining to make any decisions at all. They often adopt a hands-off approach, leaving it to lower-level leaders to address and resolve the resulting challenges.
This past December, after continued assurances that 'there will be no layoffs' and several smaller, sneakier rounds of layoffs earlier in the year, Scribd underwent a 'restructuring' that resulted in the dismissal of a full 10% of its workforce, citing the elimination of the affected positions. Since then it has been noted that a number of the 'eliminated' roles are now being outsourced to overseas contractors, while others are listed as open recs on the company careers page. Who can tell whether the ‘restructuring’ was a miscalculation about what kind of manpower they’d need to accomplish their 2024 goals, or if the goal was to reduce the salary and wages line in their expenses spreadsheet? Either way, it smacks of poor leadership and disregard for the people who actually build the products.
