Great if you fit in with the company culture
Pros
* It is a great place to work if you just want to come in, do a reasonably good job for the day, be nice to your coworkers, and go home. Almost everyone is very friendly and nice. Also good if you want to find a place to work until you retire as Waters values long-term employees. * Good work/life balance. I usually work 40-50 hour weeks except when in crunch time. Many people choose to work 8:30-5 Monday-Friday. Weekend work is rare. * Hardware products are very successful -- market leads generating a lot of revenue and the company is doing well overall. * Ergonomic work areas, such as desks that raise and lower so you can sit or stand as you work. * Two gyms for employee use * Fabulous company cafeteria. The president and CEO eat in it every day and that says something about both the cafe and the company values.
Cons
* It is a hard place to work if you are passionate about what you do and really want to succeed. Politics are rewarded instead of passion and individual excellence, which are tacitly discouraged. * Management is incompetent on an *unimaginable* level. The software division is very poorly run and each time they get rid of a manager for failure they replace him/her with someone just as bad. Same bad decisions are made over and over; they are just incapable of learning from their mistakes. It can be discouraging though many of us still try hard. * Way too much process related nonsense around development activities. I spend up to 50% of my time paper pushing rather than writing code. There's talk of trying to go Agile to mitigate some of this, but with the management team we have right now there's a good chance that effort will only make things worse. * New office layout has 4 foot cube walls so it's really open space with no privacy, though at least people have learned to be quiet.
