-Expected 50 hours a week (excluding your lunch time) at the time for below market salary. People would have to come in on weekends sometimes to meet their hours if they had appointments or something during the week. I've heard they have generously reduced this to 45 hours now.
-Very low compensation for what was expected. The feeling was that they hire really smart people early in their careers for cheap and milk them for all they are worth until they burn out.
-The engineers referred to the back of the office where we worked as "the sweatshop", to give you an idea of how respected we felt.
-On the notes of respect and sweat, the extremely frugal CEO (more on that below) had a cover installed over the thermostat, which prevented us from making any changes to the temperature in that area. Make of that what you will.
-The worst 401k matching scheme I have ever encountered at a company. My offer letter and employment docs said "3% match" which is pretty standard, but after I started I learned it was a 3% match with a 2 year cliff (they put the money aside but you get 0% of it until 2 years) AND then took an additional number of years to actually get the full 3% that had been paid in- I believe it was 20% vested per year. In a system like that it would take like 6 years to get your 3% match. A bad 401k scheme is usually either a graded vest OR a cliff vest, both is bonkers. If you leave before the cliff you get nothing, and if you leave before its fully vested your 3% match is a lot less than that.
-No sick time, and only 10 or 15 days PTO when I was there.
-The profit sharing was for the most part, a joke. I believe some people got a decent payout from it when they sold off part of the company. But for a normal year, you could clearly see the amount put into the "profit share" during the annual meeting and compare that against the share you and your coworkers got and realize how that profit share is split. Look at all the lowest star reviews- they all mention the profit share being a joke and the response from the company each time is "but we sold this part of the company and all the proceeds from it went into the profit share!". It doesn't matter how much goes into that profit share- people are calling this out because of the distribution of that profit share, not saying it doesn't exist.
-It feels like they started nudging employees to leave positive reviews for the company on Glassdoor. The company has a lot more reviews than it did only a few years ago. Most are not from the Bedford main office and not reflective of the experience there. I am skeptical of a lot of the reviews that are here, considering every other engineer and product manager I worked with hated it here.
-The CEO is a heavy micro manager and that's the nicest thing I can say about him. Was disrespectful to other people when they aren't around to hear it. Frugal beyond belief, whether that was salaries, expenditures, or benefits for employees (see other points for more on those specifically). It is incredibly clear you are an expense to be minimized. They don't want to spend a cent more then they need to, on ANYTHING. They would celebrate birthdays that were weeks or months apart in batches so as to only buy one cake. The catered lunches on fridays had to cost less than some small, arbitrary amount per person, I think it was something like $7. This would become readily obvious when you ordered from certain places (local sandwich shops) instead of a more family style place (chinese or pizza), when you wouldn't be allowed to add cheese to a sandwich because it would put you over that threshold. The engineers and product managers would joke about how Jeremy would expect a single engineer to be able to perform the role of an entire branch at another company with none of the resources, and it really wasn't far from reality. It wasn't uncommon for you to go to a weekly meeting and get derailed into researching something because the CEO saw it in a youtube video.
-Doing things the correct way was not the focus. The priority is doing things the cheapest way. To give an idea of how that manifested, lots of the tools we used on a daily basis were janky home brewed contraptions, like a toaster oven rigged up for heating things, and a box fan with a cup on the end being used as a centrifuge where you had to use nuts and bolts in a cup on the opposite side to counter balance it.
-Very rarely would the company seek out proper expertise in areas outside their specialty, instead just expecting their engineers to magically ramp up on these very complex areas and processes so the company wouldn't have to spend money on consultants.
-10% bonus based on your goals, and it was pretty explicit that if you met all of your goals, then they weren't aggressive enough. There are some goals for colleagues that were set in my time there that last I heard were still not met years later.
-Expected 2 months notice to leave. I forget what the penalty for not giving two months notice was, but I believe it was forfeiting some of the benefits (I think the profit shares you earned would taper off over time if you gave 2 months notice, or you forfeited them if you didnt give 2 months)
-Multiple engineers felt like they were bait and switched- told they would be working on one thing during their interview and then working on something else entirely when they started- myself included. At least one time somebody who was hired as a mechanical engineer got moved instead to be a product manager almost immediately after starting.
-No HR department when I was there. We were told to bring any HR issues to the CEO's wife, who was a cofounder and exec at the company. As I'm sure you can imagine, nobody felt comfortable doing that. But since nobody said anything I'm sure there were no issues!
