Pros
Nice new building. Good furniture. Good cafeteria. There are a few smart and good people working there, but most have left. You can negotiate a good salary, but obviously there are no stock options. Your bonus structure lasts for a maximum of 3 years, after which you only get your salary. There are an annual and semi-annual merit-accomplishments bonus programs.
Cons
If you need any kind of visa, those guys will make you jump through hoops. It's not uncommon for a competitor to steal a candidate to whom SSI had extended an offer just because SSI was incompetent on how to go about their visa, or worked on it too late. They make it really hard to start working there, dodging you on your start date. As part of your new-hire packet, you're asked to write a positive glassdoor review. (As if you can give a meaningful review after working 2 days there?) You have to write status reports (what you've actually done every day) on a weekly or daily basis (depending on the team you join) in order to justify your existence (to Korea Headquarters, KHQ) at the company (SSI). Dress code: business casual: no sandals, no shorts of any kind, no T-shirts of any kind, no baseball caps, no hats of any kind (which sucks if you're balding at any age). If you break any of those rules, you get talked to by your manager and eventually written up by HR. HR likes to write you up for anything, in order to use that as ammunition later, if they need to fire you. Management employs scrum and Agile for their development, which does nothing more than simply ask status everyday from your teammates. It's another form or micro-management. Not uncommon for an employee to have more technical experience than than their manager, yet their manager somewhat giving them technical tasks which result in wasted time and effort. Nine out of ten times this is the case. One out of ten, you'd find a manager who has superior technical abilities and wonder how they've survived so far in this very typical Korean company. Management is your typical Korean style management: They don't trust you about anything (ergo, reports every day). You have to do exactly as you're asked. However, if you do get under their skin, you can tell them anything, and I mean anything, and they'll believe you and follow it exactly as you tell it to them. As such, politics is alive and well. The population demographic is loosely: management/technical leads in advanced age ready to retire, developers fresh out of college with little experience (but very, very ambitious, to the point where it is suffocating and very political). This creates an interesting environment as described above and in the following paragraph: No innovation. Everything is done at the last moment, in the seat of their pants. No research in algorithms or technology. You'll find infantile "algorithms" if you can call them that in their designs and code, and old tools used. Neither the algorithms nor the technology scales forward, and for this every new product is last moment decision, barely meeting customer expectation and barely meeting product criteria and barely competitive performance compared to similar products already on the market. You wonder, then, how they make the sales and how they get the market? 1. They undersell your product (if you're a competitor) and 2. they make promises which they can barely keep and meet. However performance data doesn't lie. No long term planning, lots of disillusionment. Obviously the result of lack of experience or dont-give-a-damn-Im-ready-to-retire attitude. No one dares to take charge and responsibility, say as a result of a new design or tool, due to 1. retribution by KHQ, and 2. being ignored and your work forgotten. Everyone waits on everyone else and instructions are received from KHQ. No reusability of code or hardware designs. Everything is new every two years. And then you hear "we have to write a lot of code to get this working", they actually mean "re-write". Every team has their own code, with their own bugs. No common hardware platform, no common platform code. Not unusual to have meetings at 5, or 6 or even at 9 pm lasting an hour and a half to two and a half hours due to the time difference to KHQ and the India office. Language barrier is there: they do understand what each word means, but fail to understand the concept/meaning. As such technical concepts are lost. They'll revert to talking to each other in Korean, and you'll understand nothing so as to clarify what they think you'd said. Little to no reason for the existence of the San Jose office: KHQ takes no advice from the San Jose office regarding design, technology and future product planning. KHQ has forced the hardware team to disband and find other jobs, by giving them insignificant projects after the HW team showed good design and strategy. Thus, there is no longer a HW team in SJ. The FW technology is slowly being appropriated by KHQ, especially as KHQ develops the HW, and Koreans do not like to have to translate things into English (or to write lucid documentation of how the HW works) for SW/FW to be developed by people in San Jose. It's much cheaper for FW/SW to be developed at KHQ, since a FW engineer can walk over to a HW engineer and speak to them in their native language (Korean). After all, 1. Korean salaries are much, much lower than San Jose based salaries, 2. there is no language barrier, 3. there is no time and distance barrier and most importantly, 4. no cultural barrier. On every floor, in the elevator foyer, you'll find a poster mounted on the wall of the company's "values". Why do they feel the need to actually post the company's values everywhere? Are they trying to convince you or themselves? Have you seen the video above? Does it look like a Silicon Valley technology company video-ad or does it look like a dating app video-ad? Why does a good company need a video-ad?