MathWorks

These are only my personal opinions after half a year in MW.

1. Benefits are sort of competitive. There are rather frequent social gatherings across departments.
2. Everybody, I mean literally everybody, in my department is nice and helpful. Great dynamics in the team.
3. The training process is smooth and helpful. You would find yourself quickly improving along the process.
4. Overall work-life balance. Light workload for most of the time.

These are the cons that are specific to my department:

1. While the ASE department (i.e., the technical support department) has good working dynamics overall, you would sometimes find yourself in difficult situations when dealing with the actual development team. You could definitely feel their attitude toward you because you were just trying to hang out with them for the purpose of transferring to their team.

2. The reviewing process is VERY unclear. They would tell you everything they would consider but not exactly how they review you (basically, nothing useful).

3. The transfer process is totally random and uncontrollable. This is kind of frustrating because you are sometimes good enough for a team, but there is just no opening. This encourages turnovers frequently.

4. The position essentially means you will provide customer service while doing some corner project works for other people. However, I felt it was described as mostly doing projects when you occasionally write people emails. This is not communicated well in the interviews. Not that they were trying to lie to you or hide it. When they have been in the company for a long time, they might have different views on how much time the technical support work would take. But you will be the TECHNICAL SUPPORT; you will pick up phone calls for a large portion of your time. DO NOT assume the support part of your job is negligible.

5. Not trying to be an *hole here, but the percentage of a certain nationality has been increasing. You would notice a lot of them are actually friends who know each other. Yes, referral has its magic here, but the current situation is too much. I mean, like 70% of the new hires are from a particular country. I don't have the evidence to say that the hiring process is rigged or something, but the company needs to investigate it. Mathworks has a limited interview question pool, which makes this even more suspicious.

Overall, I think it is a great position for you if you are from an engineering-related area and want some super entry-level job to get onramp to software engineers. If you already have enough development experience, this might not be a good place for you to improve yourself. Mathworks is a good place for you to stay for the rest of your life, so if you are ready to commit in the long term, this is also a good position for you.

1. Improve the reviewing process. Make it clear, just like the good feedback systems we have right now.
2. Improve the transferring process. Otherwise, we will discourage people and encourage them to look around.