MathWorks

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.

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...

• Reduce waste and reward engineers who have stayed long-term and contributed to the department.
• This is a technical support program, not an engineering development group. Market it as such.
• The engineers you hire have different career goals and ambitions – respect that! Don't stand in their way of pursuing other career opportunities within the company and building the skills they truly need.