If you just tell Jim that he is a genius and all of his ideas are wonderful, then you will do well here.
Pros
My boss, the CTO worked in New Orleans and I saw her a total of 8 times in 2 years. She seemed to only showed up when it was time to "scare" or "motivate" our group into coming to the office on time, or when there was some big "Announcement" (i.e. yet another re-branding). The rest of the time I got tacit approval and sometimes tacit disapproval for my work. At no point did I ever get actual feedback, guidance, support, helpful suggestions, insight into my priorities or anything else to actually do a good job. Now that I think about it, I never even got a job description. They did however get us a dart board for our office and really fancy orange chairs hoping to show us that we worked for an an actual technology company. They want so bad to be a Facebook or google. The CTO was obsessed with hiring only "hackers", probably because she has no actual technical experience. Her only skill is bullying; there is no leadership ability here at all. Oh Starbucks is near by and so is tri-rail so that's something to consider.
Cons
I never knew what the heck was going on, it seemed like every day there was a new strategic initiative. They fired all the sales people at least twice a year and any of the actual development work was sent to India. It was hilarious how much of the company money they spent on vanity things like new pictures for executives (seriously, how many corporate head shots do they need?) and new office furniture for Jim's huge corner office. Although I was never important enough to get invited to the Holiday Party, Jim would fly in all his executives for what sounded like a lavish weekend. It was so funny when someone would park in Jim's parking space. He hated that since his neon yellow Porsche really should be covered. Also, they spent 99% of their time thinking about the "look and feel" of the website and the corporate colors and logo and all of the things which actually don't matter in the least. When you have no substance, you have to focus on style. I Had to listen to Jim's "brilliant ideas" for revolutionizing b2b analytics on a weekly basis. I tried to provide some statistical rigor to the boneheaded "supply chain index" but was only told that I was being negative and that I should be more aggressive with my ideas (what ever that means). Finally they went ahead and published this "supply chain index" without my suggestions and from then on, every month I had to manipulate the data just to make sure it had "face value" (Jim's term not mine) because he created his "supply chain index" with neither validation nor reliability checking. Face value is the supreme metric at Cortera. This business exists only because of Jim's shady contacts with 'data brokers'. The company gets stale data and tries to make it useful with "machine learning". Has anyone ever asked what is this "machine learning"? Seriously, ask Jim; what are the machines actually "learning?" Are these robots making predictions? If so what are they predicting? What are the confidence intervals of these predictions? How about the confidence intervals of the trained parameters, do they contain zero? How have the training samples been built? Have these results been validated with hold out samples? Does the CTO or CIO have any idea what these things are trying to predict? Has anyone ever seen any information from this company that can demonstrate their products do what they claim? I am shocked that Cortera is still in business.
