- The primary product (Nova) that got Shield off the ground is... pretty poorly designed. Even after years it flies badly. From a software/AI perspective, it does a lot of amazing things--the autonomy team really had to pull the weight because the physical design was very problematic. It was obvious that some of the engineering leadership did NOT know what they were doing. Education does not equal practical knowledge.
- The CEO and leaders always praised overworking. It sometimes felt like a cult, to be honest. They acted like an early stage start up rather than a maturing company in order to gaslight people into working longer hours and putting up with unreasonable timelines.
- The military focus of the company meant there was a bit of a male-dominated culture ("bros") -- and like others have said, the people at the top are at the top because of knowing someone or having a military background, not because they're good at their job. The culture was better on the engineering side, however.
- Lack of gender diversity -- it's hard, especially in robotics and in a military-focused company. But a lot of female employees have left, and I didn't see much success in recruiting more. Some of the men (primarily on the business side and not engineering) made various women feel uncomfortable during my time there. Not all, of course, a lot were great to work with.
- A lot of the lower/middle management I worked with, though incredibly smart and dedicated, did not have the experience they really needed to properly mentor people and drive the best decisions. Everyone was relatively fresh out of school, so we were missing a lot of core/fundamental experience that would've helped design a more robust software/hardware ecosystem from the beginning.
