Sinking Ship - werkgeversreview Director bij ITHAKA

The team, the culture, the benefits, the opportunities are all 10/10

I don't really have any, except that in the new political environment, they've taken some pretty big hits. Not their fault, but something I would want to consider as an applicant.

1. Remote work 2. Mission of expanding access to knowledge is noble 3. Some genuinely great and crazy intelligent engineers to work with. One has even written and published a couple books on Python.

Unfortunately the cons significantly outweigh the pros at this current moment: 1. Ithaka had a layoff of 9% headcount in October 2023, and now another layoff of 12% headcount in October 2025. In between this for the most part there was a hiring freeze. Morale is low considering ~1/5th of the people you've worked with over the past couple years have been laid off. 2. I wouldn't say Ithaka and JSTOR is in a dying industry, but it certainly isn't healthy. Ithaka is reluctant to raise prices of products and services to increase revenue, institutions that use our products are increasingly tightening their budgets, I believe JSTOR has already saturated the market as much as it can, and user growth and usage is just going to get worse with AI tools and LLMs being able to provide quicker and better answers than JSTOR could. 3. This can be team specific, but as other reviewers have noted, the development process is bogged down by many, many pointless meetings. This points to problems within product and senior leadership, and their own inability to efficiently and effectively plan and prioritize, but manifests itself in all these meetings for engineers. Engineers are regularly asked to be in 4+ hours of meetings a day between sprint planning, product planning, strategy planning, retros, 1 on 1s, feedback sessions, meetings about meetings, you name it. I'm not saying all of these meetings don't have merit, but it can be draining to be in multiple hours long meetings talking about where to move a button on a page. 4. Senior Leadership. Senior Leadership and specifically the president I have no trust in. With the 2023 layoffs, we were told the layoffs would come with a restructure of the organization to "improve our ability to deliver most effectively on our mission and goals and to support our financial sustainability" and that it was urgently needed to get expenses and budget deficits under control. As part of the 2023 restructure a new CTO was hired, who immediately hired a bunch of middle managers as directors of engineering from her former company to put in between her and current Ithaka engineering management. Some directors of engineering only had 2 reports during this time, while other managers had 10+. I don't understand how this was allowed or considered a good use of financial resources. Also during this time Ithaka was aggressively trying to launch a new product line for institutions. Instead of leveraging in house engineering as much as possible to help with the initiative, Ithaka hired a number of expensive contractors. When asked earlier this year why are we hiring contractors when we're already running a budget deficit and have in house talent, we were told that Ithaka's board is ok with these deficits for the initiative. Well apparently the board is NOT ok with these deficits, and here we are with another round of layoffs being told the exact same thing that they are urgently needed. One of Ithaka's values is Trust, but after this I wouldn't trust what's said by senior leadership. I'm not naive enough to state layoffs are never needed. Ithaka was and still is not in the healthiest position in terms of financial sustainability. But there were a lot of head scratching decisions over the past two years and this latest round of layoffs are the culmination of those decisions. Fortunately the CTO is out, there's a shakeup on the product side, and a number of middle managers that weren't needed are also out. Unfortunately though, there were a lot of talented engineers and engineering managers that were also laid off in the process, some being there for over 10 years and having built up a lot of Ithaka's systems. It doesn't seem like much thought was given in terms of keeping the best talent. Also unfortunately the president is still making key decisions, and it's very tough to see good people laid off while also seeing the president's compensation essentially double to $700k over the past decade according to Ithaka's form 990s. We'll see if things get better but I wouldn't be surprised if in another 2 years there's another round of layoffs.