The most disorganized and unfocused place I have ever worked
Pros
The office is gorgeous---located in the USA Today building, one of the most prestigious office buildings in the Tyson's Corner area. Marble floored lobby with trendy juice bar, full service cafeteria, underground parking, surrounding beautiful lake with waterfall. The company also supplies perks such as free drinks and office snacks. But this is not necessarily a plus for the company, because this ultra-high rent office space just further shows the misplaced and confused priorities.
Cons
The product idea for DGS is a good one---drone threat detection is an urgent priority. But management seems to have no idea how to organize a team to make this product a reality. The engineering staff is a hodgepodge of employees of various disciplines---programmers, engineers, a few physicists, and managers---many talented people. But there is no thought how to bring those talents to work together as a team. The CEO is not a technical person, and he seems to just hire randomly and hope something will happen. When I worked there, one day a "technical writer" person suddenly appeared---I have no idea what technical writing needed to be done. A few weeks later she disappeared. One day a "chief technical officer" appeared---a former Stanford professor, and instead of focusing the team he filled everyone's day with clouds of academic fog, making the issue even worse. Parts of the company are located in Argentina, and many workers work off site and I never met them. Some employees flew in to the office for a few days every couple of weeks, rolling suitcases into the office. I never understood how the division of labor could be handled among such a far-flung mishmash of locations and employees. Perhaps with highly organized staff meetings and good management, this crazy structure could be made to work, but that definitely wasn't the culture. The beautiful office environment made it nice to waste time hanging out in the lobby watching people, but I was disturbed because it seemed a crazy waste of money for a small technical company---perhaps the CEO thinks this "trophy office space" (as the office park brochures call it) will favorably influence clients, but it further shows his lack of appreciation for engineering types, as engineers are impressed with product specs and results, not people wearing fancy suits in fancy offices. The actual drone detection product, to the extent it exists, is a thrown-together collection of hardware and software distributed over various platforms, written in multiple languages, and implementing a confusing mash of approaches ranging from adaptive artificial intelligence learning to phased array direction finding. It's the best attempt of many talented people to produce something in their own area of expertise to contribute to the problem solution, but it's a disorganized mess and I have no idea if it actually works or not. The company website "news" section announces that the product has been deployed for a multi-year test at an airport in Britain, but the news article is written in such a non-committal and ambiguous way that it makes me suspicious.
