The pay is terrible. I started at an entry-level position and the salary I was given was not considered a living wage for the area. SAGE has US offices in DC and Thousand Oaks, CA (30 miles north of LA). Both of these areas have high costs of living, which makes it difficult for people to afford to work at SAGE. This causes a lot of barriers and I believe it contributes to the lack of diversity among SAGE employees.
Related to pay, if you do receive a promotion, there is almost no room for negotiating a raise. 10% is considered the standard. In my five years there, I didn't hear of anyone being able to negotiate for a higher raise than what was offered. This really puts people at a disadvantage if they start at SAGE and work their way up through the ranks. They may make significantly less than people in their same position who came from another publisher.
Promotions are also few and far between. In my role there were multiple levels (assistant CDE, associate CDE, CDE, and senior CDE) and it was difficult to convince management to promote you from one level to another, once you reached the associate level. I was at the associate level for over 2 years. Every time I asked my manager what I needed to do to be on track for a promotion, he said it was a "matter of timing and being visible in the department." He wasn't able to give me guidance on how to reach those goals, despite my asking several times. It absolutely feels like you'll only get a promotion if the higher ups like you and approve of your promotion. Additionally, the managers on my team were not willing to go to bat for their direct reports to push for these promotions.
Training for my position was nonexistent. It was even something that the managers joked about. You essentially had to train yourself by reading through whatever documentation you could find and asking your colleagues questions. Managers were of little help in this area. Currently the managers for my team do not have direct experiencing developing books and digital products, so they had never been in my shoes and could mainly give abstract advice.
Although SAGE says it's committed to DEI, there's been little movement in this area for the past year. They still continue to sign and publish books that have racist, sexist, homophobic, and classist content. Not every book has these issues, but management is well aware that some of the books they publish have these issues. But if a book makes enough money, they will continue to publish it and consequently will not take the time to really address these issues, since they have a set publishing schedule to meet. I often felt like their DEI work was very surface level, as management seemed unwilling to have a real discussion of when they'd draw the line in the sand and stop publishing problematic books, regardless of how much they made.
Lastly, things at SAGE are constantly changing -- and not necessarily for the better. SAGE is shifting more and more to an educational technology company instead of a traditional publisher (or at least college US College is). One reason why I left is because SAGE has introduced several new programs and processes that create more work for employees and actually takes them away from the work that they'd like to be doing, due to inefficient systems. SAGE tries to create their own proprietary systems, which is a huge issue because there are tons of bugs to work out. Additionally, management seemed unwilling to listen to feedback or try to learn from their mistakes before moving on to the next change.
