Pros

The ACCESS folks in Sunnyvale are the best team I've ever worked with - they're smart, hard working, and friendly. The programming is really interesting, and U.S. management lets us do our jobs without getting in the way.

ACCESS has offices and customers all over the world. It's great if you like to travel or work with people from other countries. And the folks at the non-U.S. offices are mostly pretty cool.

They're open to telecommuting, the health plan and bonus plan and other benefits are good, there's lots of free food, and free lattes in the break room.

Turnover is pretty low, and the hiring process is very selective, so you work with top-notch people.

I feel lucky to work here. Headhunters call and I just laugh.

Cons

The code/build/test cycle is very, very slow - but that's the same with any embedded system programming.

The QA team needs some training: "doesn't work" is not a bug report.

Top management is Japanese and hates to lose face or deliver bad news. If you want to know how the company is really doing, ignore what they say in company meetings and read the investor reports from the web site.

Advice to Senior Management

You need to treat Americans like Americans, and we're not Japanese. Here are a few suggestions.

If the company lost money, admit it in the monthly company meeting. Usually, you just zip over that PowerPoint slide real fast and hope nobody notices - but when you do that, we do notice, and we remember 2007 when you laid off 40% of the company. So have some guts, tell the truth, and explain why we shouldn't start looking for another job. We'd respect you for it.

If you make American engineers work on too many dumb ideas that don't ship, they quit - especially in Silicon Valley, where top engineers can always find work. We've lost a lot of good people that way in the last few years. So when your customers have bad ideas, you need to learn to "just say no".

Many Americans don't just want a paycheck, we want to feel like the company we work for is going someplace. But it doesn't seem ACCESS has any goals, just knee-jerk reactions to customers. You need to tell us plainly where the ship is going, and show us that somebody is actually steering it that way.