Avantages
There are a lot of intelligent, hard-working, energetic Kivans at the individual contributor level. The robots are fun, and the culture can be moderately rewarding at times.
Inconvénients
While there are some managers that don't apply to the following statement, overall this is the worst management team I have ever worked for. The decision making process is embarrassing, and leads to substantial amounts of problems and product quality issues. A culture of poor decision-making has led to habitual work/life balance issues amongst key contributors who work long hours in order to fix the problems made by poor decisions. In many cases, this is the only reason that deliverables are met on time. This has led to burnt out talent leaving the company more and more frequently, increasing the impact of poor decision making. Inter-departmental communication is virtually non-existent, or diminished to email exchanges that add/remove key personnel on a whim. In the exhausting amount of time I have been at Kiva, I have seen very little evidence of accountability for middle management, most of which is pushed off to the talent. The end result is the loss of a talented person who is of value while retaining the initial problem to begin with. I'm thankful for the opportunity to work with such interesting technology, but I've come to feel that as my first job out of college my future endeavors will be in spite of what I've experienced here as opposed to a result of it.