MathWorks

Free breakfast on Wednesday.

Free cookies on Friday.

Free fruit every morning (if you get to work early enough).

Free dinner every day of the week if you stay at work late.

1. Promotions are based on years of experience, or how many years since you got your bachelor's degree.

For technical positions, new hires with a master's degree and no work experience generally enter as "Level 2".

After 4-6 years of decent work, you are promoted to "Level 3" (Senior).

After that promotion, you'll have to wait 10-15 years for your next promotion to "Level 4" (Principal).

For many people, they get one promotion to "Level 3" (Senior) and that's it!

1. No work-life balance if you work on products in the CDA area. This covers all products that require Simulink.

Work with product teams in the LTC area (MATLAB and toolbox products) if you want work-life balance.

1. No work from home at all. (But some managers don't care when you work from home, so enforcement is uneven.)

2. Each year, your performance rating is decided well before you start writing the self-review. So nothing that you write in the self-review has any effect on your rating.

What you write is to justify the rating that was given to you.

Be honest about requirements for promotion. People have no idea that you need minimum years of work experience to get a promotion.

Make clear the process for performance reviews. People waste lots of time writing self-reviews that make no difference in the rating.

Look at how many people leave the CDA area. Something is very wrong with the way Simulink products are developed and pushed out the door. Releasing new versions every 6 months is a bad idea for Simulink products. Think about releasing new versions every 12 months so that developers are not under constant pressure to add new features and keep fixing bugs.