For women either working in or with technology this is a toxic and hostile working environment. You can expect to be shouted at in meetings, patronised and treated as though you are stupid. This treatment is commonplace from not just peers or subordinates but also from management. You can expect that you will be slated to management on a regular basis and its common to be reported for not doing your job properly, These claims will have no evidence yet they will be believed. Surely you are thinking that your manager will have your back, don’t count on it, Gaslighting and victim blaming is a common problem and even if the manager witnesses this hostile treatment, you will be told its not happening. HR then, they will have your back, again don’t count on it, They will also tell you that there is no issue. Managers who can see that there is an issue and try to help, because they are not part of the clique, they have no power to assist or support. You are alone and you will be treated as less capable, less intelligent and of lesser value. Not all managers are bad and not everyone behaves in this way however this is endemic in the technology group.
Bullying is not restricted to one group, as this has become an accepted culture, external vendors have now also started to behave in this way, adopting the behaviours that they are witnessing and mimicking these to fit in. I was also bullied by a VP insisting that I approve a change that was not fit for release. I held my ground and I was not the only stakeholder that held back approval. The VP went around those who did not approve and the implementation went ahead anyway, the priority was the delivery date not the quality of the delivery. Did the project go live on time, yes. Was this fit for purpose, no; could transactions be processed successfully, no. was there a secondary release to fit all the issues that had been identified as blockers in testing, yes, this should have been the true go live date. The focus was only on the original delivery date, nothing else. This was escalated to management, no action was taken, they were not interested.
All women who have left the technology group have been replaced by men. It feels as though it’s a initiative to create a male only department. There is a women in technology group, however women asking to join have been told no even if they are both women and in technology. It’s not clear what the function of this group is further than ticking some DE&I box.
Decision making in technology can only be described as catastrophic. Systems are replaced with alternatives that have no track recorded at all, no other clients and the supplier has no understand of basic technology principles such as code control. In many cases these suppliers are so small that they do not even have a test environment only production. There seems to be little assessment of the capabilities or due diligence before these are added to the estate. If there is due diligence then it must be seriously flawed not to identify these types of issues., This has not happened once but multiple times. It seems that the decision making is not for the good of the company but for the good of the individual through some form of self preservation.
Let's talk about the CTO. In an all hands meeting on the 25th April 2024, introducing the new group VP to the team, he described the team as a “dumpster fire” when he started at Wiley. There were over 120 people in that meeting and what a horrible and offensive way to describe the team. To put this in context, when the CTO joined Wiley, SAP had just gone live, this was a herculean effort, teams were working around the clock to get over the finish line, and everyone felt pleased that the go live had happened. The CTO in has first staff meeting, just after the go live, stated “ I hate SAP” and went on to continue to talk about how much he did not like the system, you could visibly see people sink. After all the effort to implement the system all we could think was well that was a waste of time, the CTO hates it. There was no grace or recognition for the effort that it took to implement the system. It was not a great start and for many this has clouded our opinion of him ever since.
Projects are set up to fail. Wiley cannot deliver on time. Lessons learned are always ignored in favour of the it will be better this time principle, yet as no actions change this is the pure definition of insanity. Team are deliberately excluded from projects, and then become blockers or scapegoats from projects being delayed whilst those teams desperately try to play catch up. Deadlines and the go live data is determined before project commencement often before contracts signed with vendors and even before understanding the scale, scope and effort of a project. This happens time and time again and yet leadership are shocked when the project inevitably misses the impossible deadline that has been set. “how could this have happened ???” This always happens. This will be the same with the modernisation project where the go live date has already been defined.
There is no project governance either, no ROI or business case criteria for new initiatives or projects. This leads to staff being forced to work on “mission critical” projects that will bring in low 6 figures annual revenue. More is being spent on the development and resources than will ever be recouped through sales. The definition of mission critical seems to be skewed.
The claim is that Wiley is Agile. Wiley is not Agile and never been Agile. Saying this out loud is not allowed and those who have stated this over the years in technology have been encouraged to work elsewhere. “Agile” came into effect in 2018 and to date there has been no Agile training. The business do not know what this is, they also do not understand what their role is. Different teams run projects differently including asking for differing documentation (sign offs status reports. Some use JIRA, some do not) PI planning sessions are run in isolation for different scrum trams and resource can often be 180% allocated. Some teams work on a 2 week sprint and others on 3, cross dependent resources are continually confused. A solution architect once told me that Agile means that a resource should be able to work on any given task with 24 hour’s notice that’s sort of what its like, work lands as a surprise and you are expected to be able to turn it round instantly.
Cost saving or as its called here “efficiency savings” have been carried out repeatedly, these essentially cut staff below management level. Management is a expensive and heavy layer at Wiley which typically does not seem to be cut; whilst the levels below are cut and cut however the workload either increases or stays the same stretching staff even further. The Peter principle seems to be in effect in some quarters of technology, evidenced by managers working at a lower level because they have no clue what they are meant to be doing.
Before the last round of cost saving severance packages were halved in the UK, this was carried out a month before the staff cuts and was not communicated at all. The claim is that this was to align with the US, however other elements of employment such as salary and notice period are not aligned. This just seemed like an opportunity to both cut costs and cut the cost of cutting staff at the same time, however the way this was carried out felt underhanded.
The most recent cost saving strategy has removed weekend and out of hours support for non production systems. The impact of this is that when there is an outage on Friday night its now 2 days before this is rectified instead of a few minutes. The recovery also takes longer, as there are days of data missing, whilst this might save money in the short term it only transfers the cost elsewhere.
There is no career development or progression. Whilst there is budget for training and development, its impossible to access. Requests for funding will be rejected either being told that they cannot see the value in this training or if you want it, you should pay for this yourself. This has been the case for many years, any training I have completed over the a last 4/5 years has not been funded by Wiley.
Bonuses are paid for company and individual performance, however the CTO “ does not believe in rewarding staff” this message has come from many mangers as they are encouraged to find ways not to pay out the full bonus. This has included changing the measure at the end of the year from a individual to group performance, changing the grading scale to push everyone down a level or more recently just saying you know the score, you cannot get the full bonus payout, its not permitted. Interestingly however the CTO does get a bonus, and this bonus is essentially based on the performance of the whole department, given the view that staff should not be rewarded maybe the CTO should also forfeit the bonus.
There is a drive towards simplicity but Wiley is anything but. Architecture seem to measure their value in creating the most complex processes and designs possible. If a system should connect from A to B. the architecture group will add further layers to the process, not considering the performance of the process, the customer impact or the ability for the process to be supported. Actions to streamline processes fail. In many cases the process flow looks like a roller coaster ride rather than a straight road.
Other simplification such as the addition of a global sourcing policy have also added more complexity and delays to process. Failure to follow the process is a compliance breach so you have to follow this but the process adds no value and only time of 4 – 6 weeks to the creation of a purchase order. That’s if the team don’t loose your request completely. The process was simpler before the introduction of the policy where a PO took 2 – 3days to create.
The new obsession is AI, to the point of emperors new clothes. What they don’t seem to realise that good data is the key to successful AI implementation however data is spread across disparate systems in varying formats all with quality issues. Wiley has not spent any time or money improving data quality, This will lead to the failure of AI, yet leadership are scrabbling to be the first to use this without considering how it will be used. This is clearly only of interest because they are focusing on cutting more staff, and boosting their own profile, for their next employer. The ESG impact of AI is not on the radar at all either.
If you really want to work in publishing then there are other publishers that have won awards for the way they treat staff, including in their technology departments. Unless there is significant change at Wiley especially in technology, the toxic masculinity and hostile work environment will remain. Women beware!
