Pros: Work with smart people. Challenging, exciting work that varies day to day. Many opportunities to get "training". You do not have to decide on a career until after you work here for a while, so there is flexibility. Career opportunities, though not as many as advertised during the hiring process, they are still there.

Cons: Management for the "Engineering Development Group" should not be managing a development group. They are basically technical support managers, and generally good at that, but do not have any clear mandate to focus at all on the non-support side of this group. This is clear as they continually make decisions that sacrifice engineers' long-term career development at MathWorks for short-term technical support goals. The work culture of the Engineering Development Group is not in line with the principles and values of the rest of the company. The dual demand for our time, coupled with homework assignments (yes, there is homework in EDG), routinely makes working after work hours or on the weekends necessary. The common complaint for this position is simply that the 50/50 support/project time split, which is repeated all throughout the hiring process and at career fairs, is simply not true. 70/30 is more accurate.

Pros: For someone without a background in CS, this is an OK deal, at least in principle, to pick up skills that will help you transfer to other teams within the company or find opportunities outside the company. The price one pays is, of course, spending the bulk of your time in doing technical support and salvaging the rest to pick up the skills you really need. The following stood out to me during my time in EDG: * Smart colleagues * Great office space and campus * Celebrations for important events, grand company outings, and other perks * Well-structured trainings and equipment * Strong culture of feedback and self-improvement, and generally doing the right thing.

Cons: EDG is a place one can stagnate very fast without knowing it. The department preaches a culture very different from elsewhere in the company. There is overemphasis on soft skills, and you are treated like a juvenile. The managers themselves have a history of a mediocre career in technology, and they're the ones deciding your fate. Your transfer out of the program is contingent on a myriad of factors working for you. No peers competing for the same position, open requisitions in your area of interest, and your manager's blessings are some of the key ones. You might have come on board with the perfect background for a certain product area, but if the company is expanding in a direction that is different from your target team, you might find yourself very frustrated with the lack of opportunities. Unfortunately, this is not communicated in the career fairs. A year and a half in, without transferring, you can find yourself sucked into the tech support spiral. Having lost your domain expertise from school and focusing most of your time on MATLAB and Simulink, which have very niche markets (try searching for MATLAB jobs versus other core languages on any job search engine), you become obsolete in the market very fast. Did I mention the increasing pressure from management to work on technical support initiatives or be booted out? They project themselves as a program with a high transfer rate, great marketing – they left out the folks they forced out. My advice: Join the program. If you don't make it to another team in a year, find yourself another opportunity before it's too late. If you do, congratulations; MW is a great place to work. Otherwise...

Pros: Great platform for fresh graduates to learn. A decent amount of freedom to choose what you want to do.

Cons: Downsides of this role? Well, after a year, maybe your learning curve becomes stagnant, and you want to move out of this role. Unfortunately, the organization is very conservative, so positions in your field of choice might not open up at all. You are literally wasting half of your time doing technical support and talking to customers who mostly can't get anything done on their own. More than half of the management is non-technical, so they have no idea of what they are talking about most of the time. Just smile and take it. Huge disparity in pay scales for the same role. If you went to a branded school, you get a lot more than you deserve; performers are not rewarded aptly.