Friendly people, incompetent management
Pros
Almost everyone I interacted with on a regular basis at Defy was friendly and easy to get along with. No big egos, people just trying to get their work done. The office is quite nice. The QA team was very professional and efficient, probably the highlight of the whole company.
Cons
The technical management is extremely disorganized. Incompetent, frankly. The CTO was my direct supervisor but refused to provide any training, support, or assistance on any topic, and routinely ignored my emails and IMs with no explanation. He was virtually never available for discussion, and in my 5 months there, he never once checked in to see how I was doing, was almost never able to answer any tech questions directly (when he deigned to reply, he either referred me to others or sometimes just said "I don't know" and that was it). The product managers were pretty on top of things but severely overworked and understaffed. The tech group in general was understaffed; 4 developers were responsible for something like 20 sites, built on a mishmash of technologies and infrastructure that was almost completely undocumented. I tried to start wrangling the documentation and writing more, but got absolutely no support or encouragement from management. The .NET infrastructure, which had half a dozen developers behind it, seemed to have severe problems two or three times a week, every week. For the first two months there, I kept asking for assignments, but none were forthcoming. There were literally entire weeks where I had nothing to do, despite asking every day what I should be working on. Eventually they started assigning me some tasks, but these tasks were on numerous different legacy systems, mainly undocumented, and nobody in the company was an expert on most of them, forcing me to learn everything from the ground up on my own. Nobody seemed to care what I was working on or offered any assistance or support unless I explicitly asked, and even in those cases usually nobody seemed to know anything about the systems I was working on.