by exememployee | 2025-10-02 18:19:07+00:00
I worked here for a few months several years ago - justifiably let go for non-performance, it was a strange time in my life and I had a lot of distractions, it was an amicable separation.

While they expect consistent high performance, the bar is reasonable and the hours can be a bit long for some but aren't insane. Everyone at the company is smart and driven. Both founders are highly technical, very passionate, genuinely business-savvy, and great with customers. Abe Erdos is borderline polymath genius - topics like wavelet decomposition are relatively pedestrian to Abe, and he seems equally comfortable in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science (all of which are critical to this business). Abe's also a good listener, it's easy to underestimate him and difficult to overestimate him. Ken Miller has more energy than anyone I've ever seen, a very broad and reasonably deep understanding of pretty much everything, and generally has strong opinions - if you want to challenge his roadmap, it's best to stay one step ahead of him and show rather than tell.

It's a fairly mature product, but the business still moves at a much faster pace than the rest of their industry and they constantly innovate. They stay on top of technological changes; they rarely take more than a year to adopt something new that is applicable to their products. Has the feeling of a "very stable start-up". They truly own both the hardware and data end-to-end, which is very helpful. They have expertise and ownership of every level of abstraction - they'll build Helmholtz coils in-house to calibrate instruments on custom PCBs designed and soldered in-house, while managing distributed systems from edge to datacenter, run their products at customer sites, maintain personal relationships with their customers and employees, and deal with legal action directly themselves.

If you're interested - understand that what might take 1-3 months at a large corporation is often accomplished in a few days to a week here. Working, manipulable demos are appreciated over presentations. If discussion hits a wall where it's impossible to know whether going direction A or B is correct, they will simply pick one direction to explore rather than deliberate further and they'll use that exploration to gain more information, open to backtracking and going the other direction, but only if it's profitable to do so.

Every person there has built a lot, either product or business. They focus on building things that don't suck, and they don't have much patience for things that do. So generally you won't have to worry about being forced to use crappy tools that make you miserable. There are a LOT of different personalities in the company, all strong in their own ways (some quiet, some loud, some blunt) so it's probably best if you are the type of person who can work with a variety of personalities - but this isn't a euphemism to indicate toxic personalities - if you're high energy and passionate you'll feel at home, sometimes opinions can fly fast and hot but the best results are gained by communicating clearly and decisively, not emotionally. Some employees are quieter and it's often best to be quieter with them and listen more. Keeping an emotional buffer/distance between you and work decisions made by your colleagues/bosses will help a lot. If there's loud direct criticism, it's about the work - not the person.

Most of their employees are on-location, but they integrate remote workers well enough - quite a few excellent employees work remotely and communication is good. You might miss some in-person chatter but you won't be completely blindsided (at least not much more than anyone else in a company that makes decisions faster than you can complete a story point).

When I was there, compensation was definitely reasonable - I was comfortable. It's an MCOL, but we had a competent developer in NY who stayed with the company through the tech boom years.