This is a long list. Compensation is very poor with key people having the attitude that the lower compensation is more than made up for by the fact that you get to work with cool technology. News flash: An unpopular and hard to work with RTOS does not cool technology make. Serial ports are not the latest and greatest in terms of HW either.
Despite the company using a capacity planning tool to determine if projects are staffed adequately, it will take on and run projects at a (sometimes significant) resource deficit requiring heroic efforts from team members for projects to succeed.
Routinely lets go staff for "performance issues" without ever letting employees know about the performance issue, putting them on a performance plan or trying to improve performance; this leads one to wonder who truly has the performance issue - the employee or the employee's management chain. In all cases, employees are walked out the door immediately as if they were criminals. Promotions and demotions (yes, this happens very publically here) are political or based on who has worked for who before (and therefore not a threat) and not the best person for the job. Some people that have been promoted are working far beyond their abilities and should never have been promoted to that level. People with mediocre review ratings being pushed for promotion while others with stellar reviews were held back.
The company has a very strong not-invented-here attitude and will spend enormous amounts of money doing non-value added work, reducing the amount of budget (and therefore staff) available for doing value added work. Competitors who focus on value add will easily surpass NovAtel in the long term. The company is also being squeezed by typically low-end competitors moving higher up the food chain, so long term prospects are suspect. Product management is weak with product management constantly changing priorities.
CEO lacks people skills. He has made derogatory comments towards lower educated staff working in the factory and brags about an expensive hobby that only a few others (with significant money) can participate in, while keeping salaries and bonuses low.
Several key people have never worked at another company and so have no clue regarding different ways of doing things. The senior management occasionally recognizes that they need to change and brings in fresh blood or consultants, but they do not like to hear what they are told and let go of those employees or cut the consultant work off early.