Cadence Design Systems

The work is challenging, good opportunities for mix of customer-facing and technical jobs. The industry is very high-paced and interesting. This is a fast-paced work environment where you get good experience, and you either learn to either sink or swim. From a technical standpoint the code is a complex product to develop, manage, and deploy for customers. In terms of working with customers, these are all business customers, and they are smart and will keep you on your toes. The sales process is very interesting, and you can engage with a wide variety of customer types that all have different styles. So, basically, there is a lot to learn from working here.

There are limited career advancement opportunities and little interest in developing employees. This is a "revolving door" company. There is very little respect for work-life balance. There is no job security. A bloated layer of middle-management is wasteful. The morale is not very good. Of course, at the moment the stock price has declined 80 percent or so in the last year, so of course that hurts morale.

The main issue is that there is no strategic career path here. Each business operates quite independently, which is caused by the growth-by-acquisition-strategy. The company is a patch-work of purchases which have their own backgrounds. There is limited technical innovation within the company, as it is all obtained through acquisition.

Create a flatter organization, there are too many middle-managers. Make some minimal effort to develop employees.