Arm

I have been working for Arm since 2009 and going through the grades from senior engineer to my current grade. The main things that does it for me are:

• Interesting and challenging work: You can be part of a team that develops the best GPUs in the market. Given the market impact of Arm it really goes without saying that this will be cutting edge work. I really enjoy the work and challenges I have encountered in my career at Arm. I wake up every day looking forward to indulge myself in my work.

• Self development You will get plenty of possibilities for developing yourself and choosing career directions. I have gotten opportunity to try out lots of different roles and gotten training in both soft and technical skills throughout the years. There is possibility for changing directions and teams if you feel that you get stuck.

• Organisational Impact: I have had plenty of room to develop my own roles throughout the time I have been working for Arm. There has been little top-down and micro management and if you have the drive you can make an impact bottom-up and contribute to optimising the organisation.

• Great work/life balance We have 6 weeks vacation per year plus 4 weeks of sabbatical every fourth year. Lately there is also a day-of-care every quarter. On average this means almost 8 weeks of paid vacation every year! We also have flexible and hybrid working - which means you need to be in the office a minimum of two days a week. The rest you can work from home. There is core hours from 10-15 that you should be working and outside that it is quite flexible when you put your hours in to make a full 8 hour day. I really enjoy how I can balance work with the rest of my life. This gives a great sense of freedom. Also I have to mention that living in a city where you can easily bike to the office while still at the same time living quite close to the nature is quite awesome.

• Great people I consider myself lucky to be working with lots of great people. We have a good community in our office with lots of great social activities. We have a dedicated space where we can take breaks to play pool, table tennis, air hockey, computer games and musical instruments with others.

• Salary and bonus The last few years Arm has really stepped up the game. There was periods where I felt Arm was lagging on this, but all the other great pros made up for it. Now I believe Arm is also top of the class on this as well.

If I have to mention something it is that there is some bureaucracy and management overhead in the organisation that could possibly be improved. It is easy to complain about this, but hard to come up with how this could be improved though.

And I have heard from former colleagues that in companies where the structure is flatter there are other challenges that come with it.

I have observed some disgruntle over the time around promotions. There are two main directions people can take in their careers when it comes to stepping up the ladder. One is to go the technical route and the other one is going more into people and team management. Given that this is mainly an engineering based company there is a surplus of engineers and hence there is strong competition to step up the ladder on the technical route and there are fewer people competing for the pure management roles (there are also probably fewer people fit for these roles).

I have seen technical people being annoyed when other less technically skilled people going the management route are stepping faster up the ladder. This might be because there are fewer ladders to climb going the technical route which is fair enough, but I think the organisation needs to think about what it can do to make everybody feel like this is fair. This could be more enlightenment on the differences on these career progressions or doing something to make people on the technical route feels like they are also climbing and getting appreciates as much as those going the route.