Arm

Lots of vacation days

Sabbatical

Above average but not an extremely good pay.

But overall compensation is a good deal.

If you see the previous negative reviews you can observe a pattern that dates back as far as 2014 talking about how terrible this group is.

Although there is a cloud hanging over the company since the acquisitions, this group was and still is a bad group to work for.

Extremely poor processes and tools. Very badly written software tools. Nobody knows how it works internally. There wasn't even a manual. Developers were not accessible at all. Shocking for a company like ARM.

There was no technical guidance. It was just pep talks like jumping on tasks as quickly as you can. Because nobody knows (including very senior engineers) how the tools work and what will be the outcome. Cancel all your plans and hope that time left will be enough.

Open cube conversations were borderline NSFW. No professionalism, personal comments were made.

Highly opinionated echo chamber, better fall in line.

If you want to stand up and complain, you will be spared in the current review cycle and properly done-in the next.

There were a lot of manual tasks with no value to your career. You just sit around typing shell commands, parsing logs and manually verifying outcomes. Scripting tasks come by very rarely. That is the most intellectually stimulating task you will ever get. Other than that you get manual and repetitive tasks that leave you mentally fatigued and take you nowhere.

Overall it looked like a made up position to cover up inefficiencies. Neither was it a software role position nor an application engineer role.

Longer you stay, the more you make yourself unemployable. Why hire a masters candidate for this?

If you hear keywords like physical design, standard cell, layout automation, please avoid at all costs. Unless you are desperate F1/H1B visa holder.