I arrived at Extron a few minutes early. The receptionist directed me into a very small room labelled 'Interview 1'. I was then given an application sheet to fill out. It asked the sort of questions that most companies ask on their online applications. I didn't think much of it. Extron is a fairly old school company. After a few minutes I met my interviewer. He seemed like a nice guy, asked me the standard interview questions, what have you worked on, how much experience do you have with Linux, etc. Then he offered to show me the work space, and this is where it gets interesting. He "swiped in." They make you swipe in and out to track your hours, he tells me that this is just so they can know who is in the building, but I'm not so sure. We take the elevator up to an upper floor, I don't remember which one. We pass the lunchroom, which smells disgusting, and enter the firmware lab. It's a windowless grey room, the kind of grey that makes you think of waiting in line at the DMV. Around engineering desks the engineers hunch over staring at ancient laptops. They're an older crowd, but seemingly quite nice. Honestly, I felt depressed being there, but it's just the lab, people only go in there to test things and use the equipment. It's not like anyone works in there all day, I told myself. Then I saw the rest of the office. You see, Extron's offices have all the management offices around the perimeter of the building. They get all the windows. The walls in this part of the building were a darker grey, like how I imagine soviet government offices. Everyone has cubes, but the walls are setup so that no one has any privacy. The cubes are also dark grey. No one had any personal items at their cubes. No pictures, no trinkets, no color. The engineers seemed very intelligent, and honestly it was a bit sad to see them working in this environment. I don't know what to think of Extron. I didn't take their offer. The whole place just reeked of oppression and mold.