Pros: Modern workplace, with nice facilities including a gym and offices. Free breakfast on Wednesdays.

Cons: Poor management at EDG. The managers tend to micromanage people and create a kindergarten-like atmosphere. EDG is a ruse for them to get technical support done by highly qualified people, and their values have diverged from the company's core values. Work/life balance is screwed up since you frequently have to work 12-hour days, and the hard work you put in is not appreciated but rather seen as standard expectations. None of the managers have technical skills, so they frequently try to evade questions by asking the same questions back to people. "What do you think?" is the most commonly used phrase here, and there is never any logical explanation for anything.

Pros: Good salary and benefits. Everyone I met was great to work with. The work feels important. The CEO is great, and it feels like the company really tries to do things "the right way". There's a cafeteria right inside the building (for Lakeside and Apple Hill campuses).

Cons: If you want to be a developer, note that ASEs do development work only about half of the time with a team of their choosing, more or less. You do technical support during the other half (taking phone calls with customers, answering emails, and troubleshooting issues). However, there is an expectation that you will transfer to another team within about a year, whether that's a development team, sales, application engineering, education/training, or whatnot. Transferring out can take longer if you don't mesh well with the teams you work with or if the team you want to work with has few/no open positions. A whole bunch of ASEs were let go all around the same time as I was. We all had a similar experience; we were given a "performance improvement plan" and if we did not meet the improvement goals after 2 weeks, we could either try one more time for another 2 weeks or take a severance package. I heard that nobody passed the performance improvement plan. In retrospect, it seems that it was really a layoff, but they just didn't want to call it a layoff for some reason. I wish they were more upfront about it. I consider this the one black mark in an otherwise great experience I had at the company.

Pros: Nice facility, good health benefits, profit dividends instead of stock options (private company).

Cons: The hierarchy of the company allows for the network of managers to protect each other and perpetuate a toxic culture. There's a big focus on process for many parts of the company, but not in terms of recourse for managers abusing their power. They are very against remote work and resisted it through COVID.