MathWorks

• Excellent work-life balance.
• Very smart and pleasant people to work with.
• A lot of autonomy in doing your work.
• Each person gets his/her own office.

• As many other people have pointed out, compensation tends to be a little bit on the lower end of the scale relative to the Boston Area and industry. However, you do gain some free time to pursue other interests, which I think is something.

• Some business units are a bit isolated from the general software development trends going around in the industry, and there is a general reluctance of senior management to adopt new technologies.

The company has two very different main product families: MATLAB and Simulink. Each serves a somewhat different customer set and has different release and quality requirements. For Simulink, the quality aspect is paramount since it is part of very sensitive industries such as Autonomous Cars, Aerospace, and so on. It makes sense to release every 6 months for these families of products. However, for the vast majority of other products, 6 months is just too slow, particularly with the need to support and integrate with many Cloud and SaaS applications.

• Break up the MATLAB and Simulink products into modular components where each version has an explicit set of dependencies.
• Invest in a modern Continuous Software delivery mechanism and ditch the 6-month global release cycle.
• Give more autonomy to the Senior Directors to pursue what is best for their product.
• Realize that what has worked in the past is not necessarily the recipe for success in the future.
• Try to inject new blood into the Middle/Higher Senior management chain; it will give you a lot of ideas and perspectives.

While the company has been steadily growing at a healthy rate (10% YoY according to Yahoo Finance), the technical computing market has exploded, and MathWorks could have captured a lot more of that share if they had done things differently.