Edtech shit hole

A lot of people at Unacademy have already resigned, and they are unable to hire replacements from the market( for who knows what reasons). Now as we all know people who are left in the organisation are going to have a tough time. Leaves not being approved, longer hours at work, mental harassment in the name of being available 24*7 is becoming a day to day thing. Now they are forcing people to take up sections of business one has never dealt with and are threatening to fire them if they are denying those roles. People who left the organisation in 2022 are the luckiest and well a bunch of well informed individuals who saw the end of this company before anyone else could have. What a time to be in edtech, indeed

Can someone share what's going on inside unacademy. What new products are they launching. How good is the traction and runway

Graphy has forced a 30% salary cut on each employee to achieve profitability this year. This cut will be applicable from February onwards until 7-8 months. Truly a sad time for the Edtech ecosystem.

Edtech layoffs still continuing? Teams were asked to strictly work from home for today because of plumbing work going on in the office. Roughly 300 people were laid off in a townhall hosted by the founders.

Was interviewing at one of the acquisitions of a major edtech player for a design role in Bangalore roughly 2 years ago. 🚩 Didn't share agreement on email unless I came to office for a day's worth of work (after completing interview assignment). 🚩 Exit clause in agreement mentioned company can terminate contract any time with a few days notice, no provision for me ending contract (never in my life did I see such a one-sided contract). 🚩 Was asked to reuse free resources available online to repurpose content for them (why fucking raise funds if that's all you want to do). 🚩 Overheard - "Who cares about quality, just bring in teachers who are influencers that can bring more students behind them". Boiled my blood. 🚩 Was tweeting all of this in a discussion about edtech on some thread without naming the company. Got asked to chat with founder's office guy while I was leaving at the end of day. They either stalked my socials or somehow came across my tweets and wanted me to bring my concerns to seniors instead of sharing them publicly. Excuses that were given - "We are a growing company, not everyone here is on our payroll, there's a mismatch in our teams internally, will take time to fix" etc etc. "You seem very passionate about education, you know how bad it is in India and we're trying our best to make a dent". Balls making a dent. I was even more furious by the time he was done talking. Politely asked me to delete the tweets (which I later did because I believe in second chances and not burning bridges). Did not sign agreement or return to work. Came to know later of more toxic stories coming out of edtech companies. Avoid edtech in India like the plague if you're still considering applying anywhere, this shit is not worth any amount of money. They are literally destroying our future and care more about their investors and VCs rather than their students or even the larger startup ecosystem. I hope these shitshows shut down soon.

Edtech is dead, agreed. But we haven't reached the quality of output which is expected from education in India. We don't have quality outputs, most youngsters are unemployed and this change has to start from education. Byju, UA or Vedantu are the highest valued edtechs but they are not the face of what an education company should be like in a country like India. Let's leave them to the karma of their shortcomings and cheating. On a serious note trying to understand how we can use amalgamation of tech and education to get the desired result.

We all have heard about the toxic culture of Edtech. Unacademy is now in the top spot when it comes to companies with toxic culture. Any company cannot be more cruel than this: 1. Abusive language by leaders - COO, CBOs, SVP, VP and other leaders treat employees as slaves. They themselves have made huge lossess and are burning investors money but when any employee voice out their opinion/asks for leaves, the leaders abuse employees badly even in front of other stakeholders. 2. Forceful long working hours - Even if you complete your work in 8-9 hours, you are forced to sit for 11-12 hours just to show the founders. People hardly work after certain hours but they just have to sit and waste their time. This is tiring and there is no work life balance. No time to spend with family. I hardly get chance to spen time with child. 3. Late night reviews - So the company has started this new way of conducting monthly reviews late in the night. People are asked to sit till 2-3 AM for reviews. And this review is nothing but a setup where COO abuses the employees. 4. Forced paycuts - We have seen a forced paycut for the leaders (VP, SVP, Directors etc). 'No appraisal' was still somehow digestable but how can a company justify the degrowth in the earnings of their employees. Company has money to sponsor TVF web series (Sandeep Bhaiya), invite Standup comedians (Biswa and Prashasti), distribute pizzas to all the employees but when someone voices out for paycuts, they don't have money. 5. No Flexibility In Working The company witnessed its highest growth and revenue when 100% of the employees were working from home but now the founders think that people do not work from home so they have called everyone to work from office for 6 days a week. If someone asks for a work from home, the leaders denies or ask to apply leave to work from home. Be it rains, election, etc - we are asked to work from office. Even during the day of election in Karnataka we were called in the office.

This could probably be a rant. But I came across this post, and I am stunned that they expect folks to pull through night shifts on Sundays and alternate Saturdays! A Friday off seemingly posed as a favor to the ones applying! In my experience, start-ups like these turn toxic pretty quickly either because the founder has unreasonable expectations or has an impulsive approach towards chasing goals! It's kind of surprising that ed-tech founders still haven't grasped the concept of how this hurts them in the long run. As for my disdain, it's also because I've seen the negative health impact roles like these carry both mentally and physically, and kind of pains me that someone somewhere would probably be picking this. What's more, noticing the tonality and time expectations, the founder thinks he is building an actual 🚀 not simply a metaphorical one😂

One of the director in Business team was fired by COO Vivek Sinha just because she took planned leaves and approved planned leaves of her team members. COO fired her over phone call . Unacademy used to such a great place up until February 2022 now it has become place filled with toxicity and CEO Gaurav seems to unaware of what's happening around him and is busy boasting how much money Unacademy has in bank. Don't join Unacademy if you want to life outside work .