Busy, lot of myopic fire-fighting, regular late-night meetings
Pros
The project schedule is mostly set up around the designers, which makes for fairly reasonable engineering deadlines. The environment offers a very good opportunity for young engineers to pick up the trade. Much of the company has strong confidence in the CEO.
Cons
Poor benefits. Only matches 401k up to $1500/year. Bonuses not exercisable (even for cash), released slowly across 3-4 years. Only upper management receive stock bonuses; senior engineers and below still receive cash bonuses, which are strangely still released slowly across 3-4 year span. Poor career mobility. Be prepared to keep working on the same thing for your entire career. Also, one should note that busy work is not necessarily enlightening. There is a constant fire-fighting in the engineering due to apparent nearsightedness. Engineer might be stuck babysitting someone else's mistake on daily basis, and there is an odd reluctance by the owners to fix their own mistakes unless they themselves are directly impacted. The sense of ownership and responsibility is surprisingly lacking from many engineers. Devastating work/life balance. The company has outsourced a lot of the design and verification jobs to India, China, and Taiwan. It has become usual for people in California to get stuck in late-night meeting running past 10 and 11 p.m. for four or more days a week. It does put a lot of stress on the engineers, and employee retention is not superb because of that - we have lost a good chunk of our team to a rival company. Working 10 hrs/day or longer is a norm here. Young engineers find it motivating that they can relate closely to the end product that they are working on. However, it is very depressing how the company fails to get design wins time and time again, after the company shifted its focus to mobile.