Pay is extremely low, starting at $20k/year aka. "training salary". Benefits are bad, I assume the minimum required by law.
The middle management (one manager for the programmers and two for the modeling team) have very little management skills. They'd usually come around once in the morning and once about 10 minutes before it was time to go home.
The modeling work is extremely boring, and it involves running AI software on large databases which can take days or in some cases even weeks. And I'm not sure what we were supposed to do during this time but you weren't allowed to do anything else. Even things that you'd imagine to be encouraged like programming were banned.
The work computers don't have internet access, and there was only one computer that could be used for research etc. It also had a primitive firewall to block addresses like www.gmail.com or certain sports sites. Listening to music is forbidden.
The only thing left to do is to communicate with the other people with the messaging system, but apparently the management reads the logs so be careful what you say.
This is not a fun place to work. Everybody seemed to be frightened and waiting for the next time the CEO goes off on one of his rants, and/or somebody gets fired. It was made clear several times by the CEO that work in California is at will, and that everybody is replaceable.
