Arm

Great benefits

4 week sabbatical every 4 years

4 weeks starting vacation, 5 weeks after 4 years

26 weeks of maternity leave, 8 weeks paternity leave

Brilliant engineers that are genuinely helpful

Strong advocate of diversity and inclusion

Internal social network service allows us to be expressive

Great stepping stone towards higher paying companies

Burn out. If you are an RTL/Verification/Performance engineer, then you now have to balance between working on multiple projects. When I first joined, engineers talked about life outside of Arm. Now all they talk about is how busy they are with no end in sight. A team that used to do monthly team lunches completely stopped and less time is spent improving the processes when we need it more than ever. Going away lunches for engineers who have been at Arm for 15+ years are more common than team lunches.

Attrition. Top engineers are leaving including fellows. All of them are leaving to higher paying companies and HR and upper management said they have no plans to change our compensation because “people leave managers” and “no one mentioned compensation on their exit interview.”

Innovation decline. That feeling of starting work on a new project is gone. Projects are now just adding features on existing designs. There’s no time to rewrite things that are out of date or to revisit things that could be worth improving upon.

Work-life balance is the best thing about Arm, but it's slowly being taken away. Engineers are adding more projects to their plate without an end in sight. Arm has a lot of vacation and has an accrual limit of 200 hours. I know engineers that hit their accrual limit because they're too busy. What is the point of having all this vacation if we lose it because we're too busy to take it?

It's preferable to keep our existing talent rather than being forced to constantly backfill, but Arm is doing a good job at hiring engineers, especially the new college graduates.

Consider changes to the compensation. No engineer is going to admit that money is their motivation for leaving in their exit interview because they don't want to sound greedy. Similarly, no engineer is going to admit that their work doesn't feel exciting or meaningful. Even engineers who are the best at what they do shouldn’t be forced to keep working on things they’re good at. Give them an opportunity to move internally before they look externally.