MathWorks

The onsite cafeteria is nice. It provides free lunch and breakfast daily.

Promotion is slow. It takes 7 years to get promoted to a senior level, whereas industry leaders in the technology sector take 4-5 years.

Old technology. Slow adoption of public cloud technologies.

There is no target bonus here.

Raises are sub-inflation level here in Natick. The average is around 2-3% this year, according to anonymous surveys and my manager's information.

However, folks in India received around 10%+ raises (good for them).

The company treats PhD graduates as people with 5+ years of experience. This doesn't reflect reality, as anyone with 5+ years of full-time work experience beats PhDs, hands down.

There are too many individuals from adjacent organizations who only show relevance by nitpicking developers' work, yet they don't contribute to product development (think software process engineering, for instance, which is a misnomer since folks there don't develop software, yet they come with new rules for developers that only look good on paper, i.e., the process about solving main branch blockers in 2 hours).

For those who don't understand, this is an organization that nitpicks developers on how forms on Confluence and Jira tickets are filled, when they can only be filled manually. It is super sad how this is even a performance metric.

There are too many internally used tools. These aren't the industry standard used elsewhere.

For instance, for code review, there are two systems: Reviewboard and Perforce, whereas the standard is to use one version control system for both, i.e., Git.

Things like extended stakeholder bonuses are very opaque; there's no clear criteria on how to get them or who receives them.

Anyone who graduated with a computer science degree would be better off taking a job at any other technology company (even at lower pay) to build up industry-standard skills, which would pay off handsomely in 2-3 years.

The overall salaries for software engineers are depressed by domain engineers, like mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and aerospace engineers, whom the company hires as cheap substitutes for software engineers.

The QE organization is too large. There are too many QE middle managers who mainly push papers. They are quite eager to nitpick instead. There is no reason for having a separate management chain for software testers. In most cases, developers can write tests just fine. Instead, QEs should be managed by software development managers.