PTC reviews

Big, can take inertia to get places career-wise internally.

PTC is constantly hiring new people. There were days when I would walk by the receptionist, glance at the interview bookings for the week and feel shocked. After working at PTC for over a year, I now understand why they have such a high turnover rate: 1. The Job is boring. Really boring. Lots and lots of legacy code, mostly written very badly. Most of your "development" will actually be fixing bugs. In the 5% of the time you will actually be developing something, it will either be something tailored to a specific customer, or a very minor feature that will take 5 times longer than it should to implement because of hard to understand code (with which you will have to integrate your changes), and because the definition of the task was not clear enough. 2. Very unprofessional middle and upper management, which leads to an extremely disorganized and inefficient company. PTC seems to have a habit of promoting people to management roles based on seniority in the company. It's not uncommon to see people who have worked for the company for 5+, even 10+ years before they got to their current management position. For the most part, these people are bad at managing their teams even though they may be good developers or overall nice people. They simply lack the right skills to create an efficient team. This manifests itself in inability to define tasks, expectations and goals properly, inability to communicate properly (with other groups in the company that depend on you/you depend on them), lack of technical feedback and leadership, poor time management, etc.. 3. Lack of career advancement. I'm not even talking about the long time until promotion, which PTC is notorious for. Most technologies you will learn here are only relevant to PTC. You might get experience working with tools that are widely used, but the core development will often be limited to niches that fit the product line of PTC. Don't expect to be gaining knowledge in open source libraries or interesting new technologies. 4. Poor Communication. This is related to the previous con, because when most of your team is inexperienced like you and your managers don't put in the time to (or are not good at) giving proper feedback and guidance so that you will be able to improve as a developer, you end up feeling stuck and frustrated. Lack of proper communication also leads to bad teamwork as group members don't know what their colleagues are working on and end up having limited understanding of the product they are working on. 5. Low benefits, average pay. Benefits are not up to par with the high tech industry standard. Pay is average at best. Bonuses, holiday gifts and stock options are so poor it's ridiculous. You end up feeling undervalued and disrespected as an employee. To Summarize: Unless you're looking for a stable place to work and don't care about career advancement, there is really no reason to come work here. If you do make the mistake of accepting an offer, make sure you start looking for a new job after no more than 2 years, or you're gonna be in trouble. It seems to be the trend with a lot of people I know who work and have worked here. In fact, it would probably not be an exaggeration to say that PTC is aware of their flaws, which is why they deliberately hire inexperienced new people who are willing to compromise for lower pay and benefits working on a boring product with limited career advancement, because they simply don't know any better. But once these new hires realize what's up, having their passion and motivation completely drained - they jump ship, and the process starts again with the next new inexperienced hires...