hey guys
i was laid off almost exactly a year ago. found this website just now and, well, wow. there is alot of doom & gloom going on apparently. it sounds like they are consolidating alot of roles into one as far as the content people go. Did they really outsource THAT much to CPI?
How many more parts of Cengage have been exported out to CPI? HR? Engineering? Do we even have a video editing team or a graphics team making covers for books? do we still have 'pods'? what is the new office like?
It's a zombie company at this point. Just waiting for the end.
yup, "pods" no longer exist. We're supposed to say "product teams" or something along that line. Also, people within 20 miles of Mason and Boston offices are required to come on-site every Wednesday.
I noticed that a bunch of software engineer roles have been eliminated as well.
I'll share what I know and others can fill in the gaps.
Yes, they really outsourced that much to CPI, although they are India Cengage employees, so they don't consider it actually outsourcing- just cheaper labor. There are very few CM and DPM positions left as they've transitioned almost everything to CPI at this point. The current plans sound to consolidate further and leave less than a dozen stateside employees overseeing some of this work. Management touts that CPI is a great success, which makes the rank and file even more skeptical because history has told us the more they boast and try to convince us everything is great, the less likely that's true.
Yes, a lot of HR has been outsourced. This has impacted my section of the company as well. No idea how many were cut for the outsourcing.
A lot of tech was outsourced. In some teams over half of the Cengage employees were culled and replaced with Nix contractors. There are now more Nix contractors than ever before.
The "pods" no longer exist. I forget the new name for them since the great reaping of the CM role, but they are a shell of what they used to be.
All these deep cuts across the company scream public offering, but First Fridays continue to try to tell us that despite the terrible pulse survey results, everything is headed in the right direction, customers love us, and our product quality hasn't dropped.