“Worst place I've ever worked, and maybe worst experience of my life ”
I worked at James Randi Educational Foundation full-time (less than an year)
Pros
Some opportunities to speak at conferences and in the media.
Cons
- The president (D.J. Grothe) is described by every former employee and coworker I know as a sociopath. He is completely without a sense of personal ethics, and will constantly lie to you and others.
- All work is bottlenecked by the president. You won't get anything done, and will feel useless.
- A culture of absolute misogyny. The only women who worked for this organization since Grothe took over (with the possible exception of a current contractor, who is not managed directly) all say it is absolutely intolerable, and you are treated like a child.
- The president has no idea what managing is. He does virtually no work himself, and instead will focus on running your work into the ground.
- The very healthy budget (more than half a million dollars in donations last year) is mostly used to pay James Randi and D.J. Grothe (together, they take $350,000 of that $500,000). Lower employees are paid less than half of what their supervisors make.
- People will call you almost every single day, asking you to help them with some problem with D.J. It's usually that he hasn't paid them or hasn't called them back about something very important. He simply does not do his work, and seems to bait and switch people out of money constantly, if their accounts are accurate.
- If you care about women's safety at all, you will be called a "radical feminist" and told your concerns are not the concerns of the organization.
- The president literally told staff that he witnessed a sexual assault at one of the conferences the organization hosts, and that he did nothing to prevent the assailant from returning, year after year. When staff expressed horror at this, we were told that the president "strongly disagreed" with our assessment that the assailant should be banned.
- The president rarely shows up to the office, unless he's recently been reprimanded by the board.
- Constant lying. I can't stress this enough.
- You may lose all faith in organized skepticism if you work here. Any sense that this organization is run by honest people who want to "fight fakers" will be stamped out within weeks. I've never run into anyone so dishonest as the president of this organization, and since the latest batch of quittings, the only remaining full-time staff are the president and his husband.
- Efforts to actually produce materials that would help people (things as simple as leaflets about why homeopathy won't help you get well) are met with remarks like "I'm not sure that that's what our tiny educational organization should spend time on." Instead, all your time will be spent preparing for TAM (which is financially sustainable on its own and could just as well be run by a for-profit organization) and making videos and blogs that are only seen and read by people who already agree with the skeptical viewpoint. This organization, at least under D.J. Grothe's management, has NO EFFECT in the real world.
Advice to Management
Replace D.J. Grothe as soon as possible.
SOURCE:
http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/James-Randi-Educational-Foundation-Reviews-E724004.htm
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