Avoid at All Costs - Software Intern Digitize Employee Review

To start with the interview process is very long and arduous. You come in and immediately get bombarded with multiple long personality tests. Then they do an interview with an employee, who may or may not even be relevant to the position you are applying for. After this interview you are once again subjected to a long test for your IQ. If you are applying for a software development role you must complete an Arduino challenge which can take anywhere from 3-5 hours. And if you manage to wade your way through this swamp of tests then you are rewarded with a two-day unpaid "bit-banging" challenge, with all the fun of being employed with none of the pay. Now if you can complete all the aforementioned trials, you get the great honor of meeting with the self-proclaimed Deca-Millionaire CEO of the company. This is the final boss of the interview process who will either approve your hiring or you will have wasted all your time, understandably not many people are willing to dedicate multiple days for the great honor of being paid a mere $17/hr. If you made it past the interview process, congratulations now you must face the 90 day probationary period in which it seems you can and will be fired for any reason. These reasons may vary from not completing certain portions of the “bootcamp” to the whimsical nature of the CEO, where you will not be told the reason, but the CEO seems to voice his opinion to others in the office(s). For this “bootcamp” period, whatever little guidance you receive will be a blessing compared to any guidance on future Digitize projects. In my short tenure I have seen many people forcibly separated at this stage, all of which had no indication of what was to come. If you make it through the “bootcamp” then another congratulations are in order, but don’t think surviving has ensured your continued employment. From now on you will be working on projects assigned and reassigned seemingly at the whims of the CEO. Most if not all of these projects have extremely poorly defined specifications that appear to change depending on the time of day and the mood of upper management. If you do manage to make a working prototype, you will most probably be reassigned to another failing project and your previous project will never see completion. Keep in mind that while you are jumping from new to failing projects you will be under the semi-watchful eyes of the CEO, who likes to veer from extremely hands off to micromanaging. And if you do not meet his expectations in any way he will not tell you but rather appears to voice his opinions to others in the office(s). Your continued employment at this company requires you to constantly read and judge the current state of mind of the CEO to ensure that you do not fall out of his good graces. Be careful who you turn to for help since many of the senior employees at the company will do whatever it takes to ensure their employment, including agreeing with whatever evaluation is presented to them by the CEO. When the eventual end to your employment comes, and it will come, you will have no warning and no time to prepare. You will be hauled into the conference room with people who have no real clue as to why you are being let go, and why should they when all decisions are made by the CEO. You will then be escorted to clean out your stuff and off the property. If you are looking to leave your job or need a job to support yourself, I do not recommend this one since you may at any point be fired with no prior indication or warning. They will not try to tell you what you can improve nor will any of his complaints be directly conveyed to you, but rest assured others in the offices will most likely know. The model that the CEO likes to work with seems to prefer newly graduated or self-learned developers and sifting them through a long interview process to then only be employed with no guarantee of length. All of this is happening while his main company is hemorrhaging talent.