Pros: MathWorkers are friendly people and outstanding engineers. You will learn a lot working here, and many of your coworkers will become friends.

Cons: The MathWorks is a great company, but the Engineering Development Group is seriously flawed. These cons apply only to EDG and not MathWorks overall. In EDG, you are in a technical support role. On a typical day, you log in to the phone queue at 8:30 am sharp. You can't sign off until 5:30 pm. Sometimes your manager will listen to your calls. You have a scheduled lunch hour. You message your coworkers to tell them you are going to the bathroom. About once a month, you get a late shift, meaning you answer calls until 8 pm. None of this is explained during the recruitment process. Each day, you are either "on support" or not. You will quickly grow very tired of technical support, and time away from it is precious. There is a shadow economy where engineers swap shifts so that they can focus on professional development or take a bit of personal time. When you are in EDG, you are laser-focused on transferring out, which often happens after a year or more. Transferring entails applying for any of the non-EDG openings that are listed on the MathWorks careers site. You have to interview for a permanent role, and you will compete with both internal and external candidates. Your EDG manager gives final approval on your transfer. Occasionally, a hiring manager will make a job offer that is shot down by an EDG manager. Engineers feel pressured to take any opportunity that presents itself because they are afraid of being forced out by management and because they have been exhausted by the tech support schedule. EDG engineers are too talented to sit this low on the totem pole. They need to be given the whole story before they join.

Pros: Great colleagues. Most I met were great to work with. If you're looking to move from a non-CS background to software engineering, it can provide you with a good transition, as they actively hire non-CS grads.

Cons: There are a lot of reasons why I would highly advise against joining EDG, and I have highlighted the main ones. * There is a high probability that you will not get the position you want once you transfer out of EDG. You can end up waiting years for a position to open up in your preferred team. Most people choose to transfer to whatever position is available rather than wait for their preferred position because the technical support (in theory 50% of the work, but often higher) aspect of the work ends up being so unbearable after around 9-12 months. * The department is constantly understaffed, and we are put under a lot of pressure to satisfy the department KPIs of resolving support tickets. This in practice meant pulling a lot of extra work to deal with the workload, and for a long time, even being asked to work on cases during weeks allocated to projects. * The managers are clueless and have limited experience with technical support. They do not seem to understand the challenges of technical support or the fact that most of our challenges stem from being understaffed. If it wasn't for our full-time Technical Support Engineer colleagues with their high-value experience and knowledge, we would be screwed. The managers just blame us for being overwhelmed with cases on "team efficiency." They would constantly come up with terrible ideas that don't work and create an atmosphere where short-term fixes and taking shortcuts (e.g., spending less time per case to resolve it) were encouraged implicitly. When these shortcuts would inevitably backfire and engineers receive low customer satisfaction surveys, the manager would act all surprised that it happened and chastise them. * Work-life balance can be a hit or miss. I had no issues and managed to get work done without working overtime, but I know a lot of people who had to work many extra hours. The main culprit of this was getting new responsibilities without adequate training or support to take on that responsibility. A common situation was when EDGers would be given the rotational team lead role and would work extra hours due to the high volume of tech support cases and the high pressure put on them to deal with it. * A lot of useless/outdated training and processes (which you often need to do during your project weeks). What ends up happening is that, in frustration, answers get copied from more senior staff who have already completed them. * EDG is an afterthought in the company, and it is seen as less important than other roles. An example is that for orientation in pre-COVID times, EDGers are put in the back of the line and can end up waiting over 10 months to complete their BPO (company orientation), while staff from other departments often have the option to do it in the first few weeks/months. * The way that management gets around their failures to hit KPIs is by deflecting the failings to the EDGer. Every year, a certain percentage of EDGers worldwide are laid off due to "performance reasons" (similar to the "hire to fire" policy that other companies use).

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...