Do you speak Russian? If so then this isn't an issue. If not, you should probably learn it because most of your coworkers will be speaking in Russian and it won't just be during lunch e.g. I've had to attend a meeting where all of the participants were speaking in Russian. Moreover, not everyone will have a great command of the English language. This is also true to a lesser degree for French. Not surprisingly American employees are not happy with this situation which is why many of Americans in the business and sales departments refer to people of Eastern European background as the 'Russian Mafia'.
Even though they advertise themselves as a startup, it's really an old mid-sized company that just doesn't have as much bureaucracy.
Consequently most of the employees are older. I would guess that the average age at the company is mid to late 40s, if not older.
Imaginary stock options: Even though you have stock options that technically vested, you cannot exercise any of them until the company IPOs or it gets bought. Since I haven't seen any auditors running around (their presence means something will happen within a quarter), neither event is happening anytime soon. Even if one of two events happen and you have 'vested options', you still need the company's permission to exercise those options. imo the stock options don't exist when you can't exercise after vesting. Once I found this out after about a year of working there, my morale and motivation pretty much just evaporated. I guess enough people were clamoring about it, that they bought a fake article (probably using a PR firm) on WSJ pushing a rumor that they were in talks to be bought out soon.
I don't feel that this is a LGBT friendly place. As I've already mentioned the culture is still predominantly older Russian. I am myself a straight conservative with a Judaeo Christian background. Considering its proximity to SF, I was somewhat shocked when a relatively high level exec (who I won't name) made casual disparaging remarks against LGBTs. I can probably mention another more serious incident but I didn't really look into it so I'm going to treat it as hearsay. This being said, I feel that the younger employees (mid 30's and younger) are more tolerant of people of different backgrounds, regardless of whether or not they are Eastern Europeans.
Xenophobia: Thankfully I've only experienced this once from an older Russian coworker who could barely speak English. It was definitely not accidental remark and it was meant to be malicious. Fortunately, a few members of his team came to my defense and told him to shut up. Again I don't feel that xenophobia applies to younger employees regardless of their background.
Developing customer service software is pretty boring.
While backend engineering is in general pretty good with good practices and organization, front end engineering here is close to a complete mess. If you're a front end engineer, you will never be happy here.
Genesys is an old company. Hence it has some really old code that's terrible that you will have to work with.
