MathWorks Senior Software Developer reviews

1. Promotions are based on years of experience, or how many years since you got your bachelor's degree. For technical positions, new hires with a master's degree and no work experience generally enter as "Level 2". After 4-6 years of decent work, you are promoted to "Level 3" (Senior). After that promotion, you'll have to wait 10-15 years for your next promotion to "Level 4" (Principal). For many people, they get one promotion to "Level 3" (Senior) and that's it! 2. No work-life balance if you work on products in the CDA area. This covers all the products that require Simulink. Work with product teams in the LTC area (MATLAB and toolbox products) if you want work-life balance. 3. No work from home at all. (But some managers don't care when you work from home, so enforcement is uneven.) 4. Each year, your performance rating is decided well before you start writing the self-review. So nothing that you write in the self-review has any effect on your rating. What you write is to justify the rating that was given to you.

- The starting salary is below market average for CS and ECE degrees. Other disciplines though (e.g., Mechanical) may not have this problem. - The Boston area has expensive housing and cold winters. - The introductory program (boot camp / EDG) may overpromise that internal transfer can take place anywhere you want. This can of course happen (it happened to me), but it depends on internal openings. If the economy is bad, or if no new openings are created in your #1 target area, then you may be stuck or eventually transfer to a less preferred team. This can be more of a problem for ECE/Mechanical graduates that may wish to reuse a specific background that they have from school. CS graduates have so many options that they do not have to worry (for example multiple teams may be working with a specific language). - The company has a lot of processes and some people may think that progress is slow. The company is very consensus driven; this is not necessarily bad, but if you want to be working alone in your office without interacting with people for weeks, this is not a good match for you. - You can work from home for at most 3 days a year. Some people don't like this.