Arm

Arm is somewhat of a baffling company. On the one hand, it is challenging and fulfilling work. Engineers (even in early careers) work on exciting new technologies, and challenging problems.

In many other companies this might lead to burn-out. But I find Arm genuinely caring. From a line manager level, I'm supported. Even as a very junior employee I'm trusted to take care of my own time, book my own leave without approval. From an organisational level, I feel able to reach out to anyone in the organisation for help, advice or feedback. Including VPs, those of whom I've met are very kind, always open to chat and surprisingly down to earth for a large company.

On the note of Arm empowering employees, I'm empowered even as a junior engineer to give my ideas a go. My opinions are valued and asked for, by the early careers team and by engineering teams. I've been allowed to take 6-month periods to work on projects of my own devising, which align with Arm initiatives.

We're also given budget for relevant books, access to proper courses, online courses or learning time.

Outside of work, there are also social committees which are funded, both at department levels, team levels and for each section of early careers. These organised events help people to make both professional connections, and also out of work friends. And gives those running them the opportunity to pick up new soft skills.

From a executive level, two things I think personify how Arm is run. In the last year, while many tech companies decided immediately to scrap their diversity programmes, Arm redoubled its efforts with the executive team reassuring us they would not be following the unfortunate trend.

The other instance was humility and accepting criticism, the IT team announced their intentions to switch the default communications platform, and after some long and open discussions eventually they announced they were rolling back the decision because as engineers had brought up, despite the cost savings, it would have made engineers unhappy.

So, all that to say, I really like Arm! There's a reason most of our interns return as graduates!

Talent acquisition is still very slow, inconsistent and obstructive to hiring.

And while well intentioned, Arm's new 'core values' (all 10 of them) are both too many for any one person to remember (do great things anybody?) and if anyone had asked a single engineer about the connotations of '10x' they would have said what a bad idea it was to call them that.

Stay open! Anyone able to challenge anyone’s decisions may be occasionally a nuisance, but it increases trust and confidence in decisions. (And may even change someone’s mind!)