The company is very shady. Management speak to each other in French and never discloses anything about the company.
The pay is very low, the medical benefits are awful and there's no 401K. I feel that I was misled about my compensation level. I heard the same from another (former) employee. Be especially wary of a "training wage". Three months in, I started to look for another job. They were looking for cheap employees and so I saw them bringing in a lot of recent graduates.
They had extremely high turnover in the technical staff for a company set-up in 2000. Of the technical staff in San Francisco, all but the CTO and one other person had been there for less than a year. In the few months I was there, I witnessed 5 other technical staff being fired or resigning of an average technical staff of 9. As a consequence, the only person who really knows their code/systems is the CTO.
Due to either the security requirements of their industry, or general paranoia, developers have access to only the small part of the code base they were responsible for working on. They made very extensive use of in-house libraries but you only get the headers and docs. The documentation is very sparse, and the in-house doc site was down more often than not. If the documentation is inadequate, you have to ask the CTO for help. Since he's the only person who knows everything, he's usually too busy. While it's certainly possible to code to a "black box" API, doing that successfully requires good documentation and formal specifications. Developers were not given specifications; the CTO would describe what he wanted in terms which assume you are familiar with their entire system
It is a fairly serious place to work and there's not a lot of laughter or merriment
