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A good place to work if you are lucky and put on the right track

Applications Support Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at MathWorks for less than 1 year
February 18, 2013
Natick, Massachusetts
3.0
Approves of CEO
Pros

MathWorks creates some of the best (and in some cases, only) scientific computing tools in the industry and is very well recognized.

There is an impressive base of engineering grads (an MS is basically required for entry-level positions).

In the large majority of cases, people work well together, and there is a cooperative atmosphere.

Honesty is placed in very high esteem, and people try hard to conform to that standard.

Benefits are very good (401k match percentage is almost unheard of in the industry).

EDG/ASE does provide a good opportunity to try out different departments before making a transfer.

If you do a good job and are well-liked, you will move up in the ranks fairly quickly.

Cons

In EDG, if you are given the wrong manager (basically assigned by luck), then your career is doomed.

Too many mandatory meetings and micromanagement. In some cases, I was asked to write a "plan" for a project that took as long as the actual project itself.

There is a strict culture of doing things "the MathWorks way," even if there are better ways out there. Because of this, it takes forever for new features, and even bug fixes, to make their way into the customer's hands.

Transferring between jobs inside the company is way more difficult than at other companies that I've worked at.

The CS grads tend not to be as talented as engineering grads, yet they are courted more aggressively due to a lack of these types of people. Top-notch engineering grads will come here, whereas top-notch CS grads tend to turn down offers here because they would rather work for Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.

Base salary is very mediocre. My starting salary at my new job was 25% higher.

Advice to Management

Be more aggressive in rolling out new features and bug fixes in the product.

Trust employees more and let them manage their own day-to-day duties.

Let managers take on more technical work if they want to. Some managers seemed to be less than happy doing pure people-management and didn't do technical work because they wouldn't be recognized for it.

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