Good place to work at but lots of room for improvement - Principal Software Developer Cerence AI Employee Review

- The salary for engineers is sub-par compared to other tech companies in Montreal (even though executives are on very generous packages). The company makes good money - it's just that the compensation budget is skewed towards a handful of employees at the top (Cerence is a public company so this can be easily verified). Engineers (even the very competent ones) are currently paid well below the market average. Management is aware of all this but there is no indication this will be rectified. - High attrition, always understaffed, so employees are overworked. At times, we don't have a healthy working environment. - No reward for loyal, long tenure employees (you get the same benefits on day 1 as on day 1000). So basically no incentive to stay long, hence the high attrition. - The company always bows to customers' impossible requests, always putting insane burdens on the engineering teams. You could be asked to work late nights and weekends at any time, with no additional compensation, meaning as an engineer, you're already underpaid and made to do more hours, so your salary is, in reality, going even lower. - Frequent lay-offs (although that includes lay-offs from when Cerence was part of Nuance). As soon as the pandemic hit, even though the company was doing well, they threw all contractors under the bus and let them go. The company was reporting record results every quarter and executives taking a fortune home - yet so many were laid off and never rehired. A whole office in Seattle was completely closed. - Lots of jobs are now being outsourced to India and other low labor cost countries. No clear direction on how this will affect European and North American teams. - Cerence uses a lot of outdated tech and low-quality internal frameworks/tools that are not useful anywhere else. Ask before you join what tech stack your team uses. - Mid-level managers are not given the freedom to reward their top-performing employees, especially on teams where most engineers are high-performance ones. - Management does a lot of lip service saying they will resolve problems but little or no action. A lot of these systemic problems could be resolved in a very short time and yet, they still exist.