Pros: Work on developing real features that ship with the product through project work. Manager is more of a mentor and coach versus a boss. Strong collaboration within the team. Opportunity to work with customers across many industries. Strong career development opportunities to develop skills that are applicable for many roles and companies.

Cons: The role is multi-faceted and requires strong technical skills and leadership skills. The work is not pre-defined, and you must create your personal plan of what projects you want to contribute to.

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: It is a very good company to work for. We get to learn social skills, like writing quick and well-organized technical emails, and speaking to customers on the phone. We also get to learn about all the toolboxes in MATLAB.

Cons: Team members were helpful, but it was like micromanaging.