Great work-life balance. Absolutely no opportunities for growth!
Pros
- All the perks: 401k, insurance, gym, etc. - Friendly colleagues. - Company outings and anniversary celebrations. - Free Wednesday breakfast and Friday cookies.
Cons
No opportunity for growth! As a mid-size private company with no real competitors MathWorks operate on the principle of "business as usual", meaning you stay at same engineering level and the same performance rating for a long time, until or unless you get lucky! The promotions are a joke! With sophisticated and secretive formulas for level/rating calculations, you're guaranteed to get the same gross salary or maybe less even if are promoted! Basically if you're promoted to a higher level your performance rating is reset so you have a higher nominal salary but a much smaller contribution from the profit sharing pool because of lower performance rating. Needless to point out that once at the higher level, rating icreases are harder and slower than before. The review process is another joke! Once a year you write a self review and a peer review (which the peer will get to read with your name on it). Your manager also writes a review. But a couple of weeks before you write your self review and your manager writes his, higher ups meet to determine promotions and ratings. So you're writing a review after everything is decided! I wonder why the call it "review"! So what you write and what your manager writes are essentially used to justify pre-determined ratings! I thought it's should be the other way around! If in a team of say 10 engineers the performance of two engineers exceed expectations only one is promoted because two will exceed the promotion quota for the team! So one is promoted and the other one has to suck it up for another year until his names is thrown into the hat again! This is the mechanism behind lower than industry average salaries and the lazy culture. A few years ago I expected the competition with open source to make a dent but that was wishful thinking!!