For me, working at the Nerdery was a huge mistake. I accepted the job without doing an on-site, because I had heard great things about the culture. Well, the culture is a myth. Behind the facade of "being the best place for nerds to work" I saw many sad, stressed-out people.
The Nerdery focuses obsessively on their developers "staying billable", which means every 15 minutes (in up to an hour increment) should be billed to a client project. The problem is developers have no real control over this and new employees are especially at a disadvantage. If you don't have billable work, regardless of what the managers say, it will reflect poorly on you, and you will be stressed out about it.
There were a few talented developers at the Nerdery that I had the pleasure of knowing, but they are vastly outnumbered by mediocre developers who nonetheless think they are total "rockstars". There is no thought given to code reuse through libraries (the time wouldn't be billable). Copy, paste, adjust to taste rules here.
Lastly, it is clear that there are problems at the top. I believe they will lie to their employees without compunction.
One example: the Nerdery launched a large PR campaign about trying to hire 100 new employess in 100 days. While this was going on I was struggling to find work (as were a number of other folks). I asked my manager why we were hiring 100 people when there wasn't enough work to go around and he told me they never intended to hire 100 people and had actually frozen hiring. A couple weeks later 26 people were let go.
