Politics and nepotism. CTO suffers from poor understanding of technology and lacks people skills.
Pros
Remote work was good and bad. Nice to be remote, but very little cohesion among teams. Benefits are pretty cheap, and pretty good. They pay 75% of the cost. Salary was OK. Definitely competitive, but middle of the road. Several developers I talked to considered this to just be a temporary stop in their careers with zero intention of staying beyond one year. Technology base is very legacy, and they are stuck in a decade old mindset. Many of the projects were just forks of other projects with custom development haphazardly lumped on top. Their turnover is very high, so often you're looking at code that has been through several different developers, all with their own styles and mindsets. This makes for an extremely unorganized and bug-filled product.
Cons
Lots of politics and nepotism. CTO makes most of the decisions on employment without consulting anyone and without regard to the effects on the projects. Long term employees were often let go with no warning, even after receiving top reviews just weeks earlier. Very much a "good 'ol boys" club. Many of the long term employees are family members of other employees. If you're not "in the club", don't expect to stay too long. They'll figure out a way to get rid of you when they're done with you. Hostile to new ideas, they seemed to be looking for the cheapest developers and only wanted them to follow specific orders. If you are a "robot-coder" with no desire to present your own opinions and ideas, then this is the place for you. If you want any sort of say in what you build, forget it. There is absolutely no upward mobility. The company structure is flat, and they people in positions of power got there because of who they know or who they are related to, not because of merit or any sort of exceptional ability. Absolutely ZERO diversity at all. Mostly all the same type of men and very few women. No racial diversity whatsoever.