The employees were incredibly respectful and nice, but the CEO was megalomaniac. Before I arrived, I was sent a self-published article by the CEO on Shield's website to review. The article was about the questions that the CEO would ask during the interview. The questions were standard. I reviewed these and had responses for all of them. I arrived and was greeted by the hiring manager in the morning. I started off my interview with a presentation on my work. As the day went on, I met other engineers with whom I would be working. There were lots of interesting questions and great conversation with everyone who worked there. It was super standard. I was really comfortable and having an OK time. At the end of my interviews with the employees, I was told to hang tight. They didn't know which C-level executive would come in next. I waited five minutes. A younger guy came in and, without introducing himself, sat down. He expected me to know him and recognize his face. I didn't. That was the first bad sign. I eventually figured out that he was, in fact, the CEO.

He started asking me his canned questions from the website article, such as "What does a team need to succeed?" I provided him with a response, which he interrupted and disagreed with. I provided him a second response of "people with no ego". He asked me if I had an ego, and I said, "Yes, everyone has an ego." From here, I couldn't believe what I heard. He went on to tell me that his CTO "has no ego---and he's the third best---no, the first best---in his field within the USA." He described the CMO: "She has no ego, but is a two-time NYT best-selling author." He added, "Our other exec, he's a retired Navy admiral and did x, y, and z. He has no ego." It sounded like people had some egos over here.

There were more pointed questions and more active disagreement with each one of my responses. He insulted my work ethic based upon the number of hours I worked, and he told me that kindness was an optional guiding principle of the company because "dictators still got things done". Whoa. I got out of there and didn't look back. There are other reviews like this on here---pay attention to them.