Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Reviews

Pros

good people, nice office, good location

Cons

too much cost cutting causing difficult working environment, understaffing produces too much stress on current employees

Pros

• Fantastic, enthusiastic people. • Loads of work and areas of improvement so you'll never be idle. • Ed tech is very interesting with many different user personas and experiences. • Summer Flex-Fridays

Cons

Hmmm...where to begin...Under staffed, under paid and under appreciated. I really enjoyed the start of my tenure here but recently there has been a very dark cloud overshadowing the company. It started when 20% of staff were laid off back at the end of last year due to budget concerns. I know all companies have to reassess every little while, but HMH seems to pivot quite often. With the reduction in staff, workload and roadmaps was not adapted. This meant we all had to double stack the workload and keep velocity. Positions were never back filled and half a year later, when staff are leaving they seem to start recruiting? There was never any alignment with other teams, strategy or understanding what the future plan was. All product teams were trained in agile and lean methodologies only to revert back to waterfall processes instantly. There was never any leadership or direction for careers or even product future aspirational states. It seems like we were just dealing with the massive workload in front of us without getting backing from management. It seems we were all siloed in the org and even individually in the team. Outsourcing design to a team which is not aligned with processes and our practices is hard and never going to work. Doesn't help the in-house team was neglected over the contracted designers. Ogh and...years of practices, processes and alignment went straight out the window when management decided to by-pass it in order to ship an unvetted, under-designed product to our users (punch in the face).