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: NOTE: This review is for the application support engineering role ONLY and does not reflect the rest of the company or other departments. Pros would include: * A safe haven for foreign nationals looking for a long-term career path and eventual citizenship in the US. They will do all the immigration paperwork for you. * Many social gatherings/events, generally positive work environment. * An opportunity to explore other departments within Mathworks and learn the tools.

Cons: Your experience in EDG may vary depending on your manager. Some managers are very by-the-book, while others are more laid back. * You're no longer an "engineer". Any notion or aspirations you once had of actually designing something cool is kind of thrown out the window. Instead, the focus lately has been transferring people to the "quality engineering" team where you will be doing software testing once you're done with EDG. To maximize the benefits of a future career path, choose your team wisely. However, most look for an easy opportunity to transfer out without any serious thought or consideration, while others are much more definitive about what they want (you’ll see senior EDG members who have been here for 3 years or more in this category). If you’re willing to work a little harder and brush up on C++, joining development instead of QE is a better career path (both pay and experience). * The company as a whole is obsessed with quantifiable metrics, more so with the EDG group. Tech support cases take more priority over projects for the sake of customer satisfaction. Example: Didn’t contact a customer for more than 1 business day? Send them an email explaining your progress, even if you have no progress to report. Long weekends are usually followed by putting extra people on tech support for the flood of email cases that comes in. Projects are the key to transferring out of EDG, but the irony is that sometimes tech support over-rules this, and you're forced to task-switch. * A member in EDG is expected to "contribute" to the team; however, the sudden growth of this department’s headcount has led to a deprivation of any sort of needed contribution. This usually leads to people coming up with very niche/useless "EDG-projects" that have little impact on actually helping anyone. Many meetings will be had, and usually nothing will come of it. Ideas spawned by managers might turn into a “pilot project” where they may test a new procedure out. Some of these projects are useful and can benefit the team, but it has been noted that a large majority of them just haven’t gone anywhere at all and are eventually killed because the idea was not-so-great to begin with. * Process. Oh, and a ton of meetings, many of which can be skipped, especially for more senior members of the team. * Try not to stick around for more than a year and a half in EDG. You’ll eventually have doubts about staying with the company over-all and wanting to do something else. Generally, your level of involvement in answering tech support questions will stagnate, and you’re encouraged to focus more on career development (picking up projects); however, you’ll still get blind-sided by tasks in contributing to the EDG team.

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.