MathWorks

Prologue:

Mathworks Natick: 4 stars (good work-life balance, work-from-home options, etc.). I was mesmerized by its Glassdoor reviews & ranking during joining, which in fact are mostly for the Natick office.

Mathworks Bengaluru: 3 stars (decent company, annual company outings).

Tools team: minus 5 stars (extreme politics & favoritism combo offer).

1. Very friendly colleagues - I made a few good friends there, which was the main reason I stayed for such a long time.
2. Annual team outings.
3. Decent hike and bonus.
4. Free breakfast and snacks once a week.
5. Very humble, cool, and inspiring CEO.
6. Friendly and very supportive HR, especially during the exit feedback interview.

I worked for Mathworks for approximately 20 years. Due to the frustrating and tortuous work environment I experienced in the architecture and tooling team (as per the theory of relativity, just like a planet near a Gargantua black hole in Interstellar), even though I stayed for 2+ years there.

1. Exhausting interview process with several rounds on one day, as if you will be building a rocket the next day.

2. Internal architectures and tools used are mostly legacy tools, sans some basic principles of Software Engineering. Also, welcome to the HTTP era. This makes the learning curve and skill set very limited.

3. Reinventing the wheel practice followed often. E.g., open-source tools are already available with developed features but not utilized there.

4. Be prepared for manual tasks in this era.

5. Bizarre decision of build failure investigation being done by RE, which is normally the job responsibility of a developer ideally.

6. Extreme sycophancy and open favoritism - it's an open secret in the team with better synonyms.

7. Join the team only if you have gained the superpower of premonition so that you can know when you are going to fall sick. Even if you have enough sick leaves, you are not supposed to avail them.

8. Once you have decided to switch, make sure to publish in newspapers whether you have offers or not. Be prepared for ridiculous questions like, "Why did you take sick leave and internal training if you were planning to resign?"

9. Unprofessional language used during mentoring and initial days of training. Ultra micro-management throughout the year. You would receive a WhatsApp call -> call on phone -> followed by WhatsApp ping, even if you have gone for a tea/snacks break in the evening, irrespective of work to be done or not.

"The enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge" - Stephen Hawking.

If you are looking for a thrilling and chilling experience, then I would recommend working in this tools team.

Apart from internal infrastructure tools and technologies that need upgrade or migration, higher management should introspect into the extreme politics, favoritism, and unprofessionalism being followed in the architecture team.