MathWorks

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.

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• A lot of useless/outdated training and processes (which you often need to do during your project weeks).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).

The fact that managers checked and had to approve the presentation slides (and removed the parts that they did not like) that some of us were meant to give to interns (so prospective EDGers in the future) as an intro to EDG, shows you probably aren't looking for advice. You are aware of the problems and have no intentions to deal with them, preferring to try to deceive future candidates. Aside from the fact that this is quite embarrassing behavior, it also fosters an environment where staff feel they can't raise any issues.

But in case you do want advice, a simple one would be to hire more people to deal with the workload. Change the ratio between EDG and full-time technical support hires if budget is an issue, given that you have admitted only a few dozen full-time technical support staff are needed to handle the workload. This would also free up more time for EDGers to spend time on project work rather than limiting their learning and growth on doing mindless support work.

On top of that, listen to the feedback that people have given over the years. A lot of the concerns raised in the past with easy fixes are still present.