The Engineering team is led by someone with minimal leadership qualities. There is no vision nor roadmap, and they get away with it by because Mastercard was their only client (i.e. cash cow) for years. The CTO's favorite line is "if you don't do this, then you will be fired". You'd think as the CTO, you would be focused on the big picture of the organization. That's not the case at Brighterion. Much of the CTO's time is focused on monitoring when employees enter and leave the office, and how many lines of code employees are cranking out. Before Mastercard acquired Brighterion, there was little to no focus on code quality. It's no wonder why customers are constantly complaining about buggy software.
The technology is very outdated. To put this in perspective, this exact statement would be true if said 10 years ago. On the Java side, developers are using an XML based UI framework (XSLT). The C++ side is a bit better, but that's because the CTO favors C++ over Java. There is an risk aversion to using newer technologies as this takes away from cranking out lines of code. Developers have little to no say in what tools we use, such as IDE, third party libraries, and even Text Editors.
The pay is very low for the Bay area. The benefits are pretty standard with a fairly decent bonus. But really, it's the culture, or lack-thereof, that led me to leave.
