Cadence Design Systems

• Large, stable company with resources
• Encouragement to participate in company-wide events such as hackathons and volunteer events
• Some teams can emulate start-up culture with research focus and fast turnaround
• Good job security if you're baseline competent, no major recent layoffs
• Innovation conferences and trainings held for education
• Listed as Top 50 best place to work

• Lots of legacy software with extremely poor or no documentation, especially from acquisitions
• Often reinventing the wheel because there is little inter-team communication or design standard across the company. You'll find software written in almost every language, sometimes the same functionality across codebases. Each team almost feels like its own company, which makes sense given the acquisitions
• Bureaucracy often stifles development time and design decisions
• Many people in leadership positions do not seem to understand the product(s) they work on, either because they were outside hires or don't have enough technical experience
• Questionable decisions made by VP-level leadership, often at the detriment of the products they affect
• Feels like the company would rather rest on its laurels than innovate. They spend more money on marketing and sales than engineering -- which by itself wouldn't be an issue if they were clearly a front runner but they aren't even #1 in the EDA sector.

Actually listen to the engineers who work on the products -- especially with research and development.

Choose a set of software standards that larger groups abide by.

Invest in modernizing build systems and software across the company.

Spend more on R&D.

Don't productize teams before they're ready for production.