First of all, why? Second, how do you get through the day?
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@ve publishing has been like this for at least the last 40 years. It’s one of two things.
Washed up senior leaders with no where else to go. They know they will eventually get canned but negotiate good severances and pad retirements.
Washed up senior leaders at end of career. All they are doing is padding retirement. I can list at least 20 people in last three decades who have done this.
Some got really lucky and joined companies who were up for sale. These folks negotiated equity and got PAID to take revenue backwards and then got pieces of action from the sale.
It’s pathetic but in a weird way, you have to give them credit!
@ce - so tell me when the last new leader in HED lasted more than 2 years. Everyone has been there 8, 10, 20, years. Incestuous. Old talent moves into new positions. It’s why we can’t beat MGH. Too many legacy employees and no new perspectives.
@gn Incestuous? That's a stretch.
Leaving Cengage was the best decision I made for my mental and physical health. Working on the HED team was a chaotic strategic mess, highly toxic and incestuous. Was there almost 5 years and it took a bad turn over the last 1.5 years. The grass can be greener! Good luck to those who try to stick it out ….
Cengage still looks good on a resume!
I was earning approximately $80,000 at Cengage and utilized my time to pursue a master's degree, thanks to tuition reimbursement.
Most of my coursework was completed during business hours, after which I spent time on my resume and preparing for interviews. After I secured a new position, I decided I would keep my job at Cengage and see how long it would take to get fired.
Since my manager was in Mason and I was in Boston, I just hung on, doing the bare minimum (often less). It took about nine months, but I was let go during a purge. i The big thing is that all the money the company had paid for my degree was forgiven.
If your manager is a typical kool-aid drinking Cengage type you can get away with the same thing and have two checks coming in. Just leave your email open and go to meetings.
Agree. I collected my bonus, took a week of vacation then accepted a gig with an 85 k base plus commission. Work environment of new gig isn’t the best, but if there is going to be employee abuse, we should at least get paid for it.
Solid, solid plan. Just go "Office Space" from the comfort of your home office.
Why? Well, because at this point it's easy money for little to no effort. It's clear that nothing we do here matters. The org doesn't exist to serve it's market, it exists to make our private equity overlords richer. And why should I work hard for that purpose? So I don't... I prompt ChatGPT to do most of my work and massage it enough to look passably credible, which won't even matter because strategy and direction change so frequently that most of it never sees the light of day let alone an accountability gate. LOL.
How do I get through the day? Easy money and zero accountability means I have bandwidth to plan for my next steps. Eventually the Cengage axe will fall and I'll need a game plan for those next steps (that is, after I collect my sweet sweet severance pay). So I get through my days by working to get my next paying gig off the ground so that I have something I'll feel excited to transition into when the time comes.
They're gaming us, so why not game them right back?