Masimo Senior Software Engineer reviews

The management here hosts a potent combination of attributes that will suck you into an abusive relationship and when you realize that, it will be too late cause you are either dead or left with stress related injuries. Here is a short list of the attributes I am referring to: Management attributes: Incompetent : For a while, the entire company's software resources were working on Stork (the baby monitor). Other projects that I was working on, despite the fact they they were making money, did not get traction at all. Stork saw a lot of project delays despite developers working almost all weekends for nearly 6 months. This is expected cause incompetent managers can only produce unrealistic deadlines cause they then have the developers to blame when the product fails. The CEO estimated the business to be nearly worth 100 million a year. Its been nearly a year after the release of Stork and revenue from it is almost 0 with a high rate of returns. It is clear from this episode that the management is incompetent when it comes to getting software built in a timely fashion, getting software built to please our users and yet somehow, they still have a job. To top it all, these bad investments continue to further ruin shareholders. Disrespectful: Deadlines come out of nowhere and everyone is expected to fall in line. Somehow, developers are just expected to sacrifice their family life to achieve deadlines and goals set out by incompetent management. They absolutely do not care if you are getting your rest in, whether you are taking care of yourself amidst all their demands of you, whether you are close to burning out and having a mental breakdown. The management here are masters of making decisions when they are so far removed from the consequences of those decisions. The SVP gives a date and off he goes to enjoy his weekends whereas the developers are struggling for the next dozen weekends to meet the unrealistic demands. And when the devlopers struggle to meet the unrealistic deadlines, the management thinks its a developer-losing-focus problem and forces all developers to attend more meetings everyday. Selfish: Management does not think working from home works. But during Covid, we launched multiple products, all the while working from home. How did working from home work then? But, if they ask you to work late, and if you say you can only do so from home, they will gladly agree in those instances for you to work from home. Hell, they will even feed you during overtime hours for sacrificing your family life and working for their unreasonable deadlines. So they will bend the rules whenever it suits them but they will not make rules that acknowledges the developer's struggles, needs and comfort. They have offices in the most expensive parts of the world, pay lowly peasant salaries to developers (no way they can afford homes closer to the office), and expect you to be in the office everyday, even if it means spending 4 hours everyday in travel alone! At least parking is free in the office. Management only follows rules that benefit the management cause developers are for slaughter at the altar of the management gods. Thieving: Remember all that overtime that we kept doing for the company again and again ? It would only be right and fair to expect to be properly rewarded. But them remember how incompetent the management is ? So revenues are low. So the coompany said, no bonuses and pathetically low hikes! I was shocked with how easily the company was able to say, "I know you guys worked hard but we cant give you a bonus". But all this while, our CEO is paid twice his peers in the medical industry and it turns out, he has been using the company's jet for his private vacations! More importantly, why do you need a jet? Are you Taylor Swift? Why do you need expensive offices in Irvine and Vancouver when you cannot affordt to pay your developers a fair share of the company's profits? The managers are all able to afford luxurious vacations and fancy cars but developers are expected to survive on peanuts. At this point, management is just stealing labour and life from the developers. Gaslighters: You go to the management with genuine issues - "I worked hard but I did not get the pay hike I deserved and therefore I cannot pay rent" or "I need to work from home 2-3 days a week cause the travel time is killing me" or "I cannot work on this machine efficiently and need a Mac" and they respond with "No. But this company is so great cause we get to solve so many challenges" or my personal favorite "We write code that saves lives". The last one gets my blood to boil cause you are basically asking the devs to take on stress related diseases to supposedly write code that saves other people's lives....code that, due to stupid deadlines, have no tests, is poorly designed and yet somehow, this code will save lives. If anything, this is dangerous cause it might lull our users in to thinking that the product will save their lives but will fail at the time when it is most required. In the long run, this company is going to ensure that we developers are prescribed the company's products to help combat the stress related diseases we would have picked up working for this company. Paper tigers: My immediate manager was a developer before they became my manager. This is a pattern for most of the teams I am aware of. This sounds good on paper but these folks are so rough, with very low social skills. Most of the time, teams end up pissed at each other and it becomes a us vs the other team thing further increasing the toxicity in the environment; I believe this to be failing of the engineering managers' leadership and social skills. Moreover, these folks are absolutely useless cause they have no power of any sort. Can they get you a bonus and hike you are owed ? No. Can they tell you what you should do so that you get a promotion? No. Can they allow you to work from home? No. Can they say no to dumb dealines? No. Can they get you a work machine of your choice? No. Can they speak the truth? No. Really, all they did was approve my bills in Concur, occassionaly take the team out for lunch, feed the team during overtime and manage the JIRA board. Do the managers themselves know this? Do they know that they are nothing but paper tigers and not contributing anything useful and could have been so much more ? Like in any abusive relationship, I suspect they are unaware that they are actually in one cause everytime, they tried to explain the company's mistreatment of developers or projects, they did so with a straight face thinking we were all born yesterday. I know you dont have any power but at least treat us like adults. I think the only guy with any sort of power is the SVP. The VPs and Directors are just mouthpieces for the SVP and these folks, at this point are mostly just a burden cause they are the ones who are supposed to provide context to the SVP so that realistic goals and expectations can be set. They obviously are failing at this big time. The engineering managers aka paper tigers simply execute what was fed to them by the VPs and Directors. In an ideal world, this entire lump of bureacratic bodies function as an efficient support system to the developers - but in this case, these bunch of folk, who have little context around the code lord over the developers who have the most context around code. Petty: Management is in a fight with Apple, so the management decided that they will not provide Apple laptops to the developers. Did this also mean that Masimo will not do business with Apple at all? No no...cause that will mean Masimo will lose money cause we still need to sell our sorry products to customers on iOS. So what purpose did this ban achieve? Will the 1000 or so Macs that we will not purchase every year expect to make a dent in Apple's trillion dollar market cap? Of course not. So, the pettiness just affects the peasant developers who were all barred from using Macs, throwing their workflows out of whack, all the while slogging to meet management's unrealistic goals and deadlines. Heard from the grapevine that the CEO himself is involved in this decision. Why in the world is this guy, who is so far removed from the daily lives of the devs working for his company, taking decisions that affect devs every minute of their lives in the office? Where is this arrogance coming from? Can you just please go back to stealing from the company's coffers? Go on another company paid vacation to Ibiza on the company's private jet or something? The company will probably be better off cause it will not have to deal with stuppid and petty. Conclusion: On a final note, given all attributes discussed, is it any wonder that a developer actually died working for the company? I was shocked to see the obituary on LinkedIn! The company, through its various actions, introduces a large amount of micro and macro stresses in a developer's everyday life and makes lives miserable even though the developers are working very hard for the success of the company. I strongly believe that if the company actually cared for its people, the death could have been prevented and we would still have his joyful smile amongst us. My only regret is that it took me so long in realizing that I was in a toxic, abusive relationship with the company. In my new company, I am afraid I might have started off on the wrong foot cause they give every 8th Friday off as a mental day to help recuperate and I was so confused by this that I had to repeatedly ask if this was just an off day on paper or did people really take the day off. Every friday evening, I tell my manager whether I will be available or not for the weekend and she looks at me puzzled cause working over the weekends in this company is such a taboo cause they respect our family time too much. I think this is just PTSD from Masimo and I will heal with time. The new place gives me an yearly allowance to furnish my home office, reiumburses my gym fees and a nice 65% pay hike and all this was after a round of interviews that lasted just 3 hours. To my fellow developers in Masimo, I love you all and I can tell you with conviction that Masimo does not deserve you. Please put in just a little effort and get out of the company. It is not as difficult as you think. There are better places to work than Masimo. To the engineering managers, please grow a spine and protect your developers. You were a developer once, dont forget your roots. To the VPs and Directors, for heaven's sake do your job. Hesitate to take technical decisions cause you are not looking at code every day but give your engineering managers enough power to do what is good for the system; help them collaborate; guide and dont dictate. To the SVP, please dont say yes to every unrealistic demand from the brass. Treat your developers with respect. It is not our job to cover for your incompetent decision making.

Some teams have to work very hard and do lots of overtime. Overtime is quite normal here and expected. You don't get much in return after putting in tons of overtime. No bonus, no promotion. Just "company is not doing well financially, so we are cutting back on expenses."