The consistent profitability of the company has come at a price. It's not run by the engineers anymore, and so it's not as much fun to work here. Schedule slippage is highly discouraged, and this can lead to pressure and a culture of fear. People are afraid to report bad news up the chain. However, quality is the bedrock of our business model, so it always wins in the end, so features will be cut or in some cases the schedule will be moved out if needed.
This is not a place where cutting edge software technologies are used. Most of the products are very large, monolithic, decades-old systems. Therefore, they're very hard to change. The company and its customers are also risk-averse. We do advance in technology, but slowly.
There are many nice and talented people here, but the workforce is uneven. Some incompetent people get in and can stay around for years. Teradyne also continues to outsource a lot of software and QA work to India and other places. The quality of these engineers is generally lower, compounding the difficulty of working with people who are far away in a different time zone and don't speak great English. Management thinks they are saving money by outsourcing, but the drag on the local workforce erases these gains and hurts morale.
Schedules are getting more and more important, and righter and tighter. It's hard to know if this will get worse, or if the pendulum will swing back and work-life balance will remain good.
Resource allocation sometimes changes suddenly due to re prioritization. This, coupled with long planning cycles and offshore teams results in a lot of inefficiencies from context switching and delivering software to QA before it's ready. The heavy top-down command and control structure means there's little an individual contributor or low-level manager can do about this.
Training and career advancement is not as structured as it used to be. You need to design your own career advancement and assert your right to do training and side tasks.
Our product hardware is in short supply, so when you need to work on the system, this can demand working odd hours.
