Arm

The pay is very good. Outside of Cambridge in most places you will earn a very good wage for your living costs.

The offices are nice. Standing desks, no hot-desks. Quiet environment and you are free to go to the one of many meeting rooms if you need to. It's a technology company so technical people are taken seriously.

Poor work-life balance because Arm Manchester mainly recruits very smart young people and makes them work super hard. Most people do additional work into the evenings, either on the record or not. Most people will claim not to even though they do! This is because the level of workload that is assigned to each employee - you are not directly told to work overtime but if you don't, you will get bad performance reviews etc.

Confrontational and competitive environment which is not really a collaborative environment unless you were hired in via a referral and already have allies there.

Lack of focus on testing and quality because there is no real resourcing for testing/test quality. It is a developer-led organisation and testing is seen as an afterthought or not important in general.

Make interviews more rigorous and reduce the number of 'buddy hires' we have where people are hired through knowing someone in the organisation. This leads to a lack of diversity and tribalism.

Encourage the introverted engineers to collaborate more and not see everyone as direct competition. Build a team environment.

Make sure there is a dedicated test management hierarchy, with quality being valued. This will result in better software. There are pockets of huge resistance to modern software engineering practices such as Agile and these need to be eliminated one way or another.