Cadence Design Reviews

Pros

1) High technical work at R&D group.
2) Really fun to work here.
3) No time bound
4) Leave policy flexible
5) Very good Cafeteria service.
6) Technically strong senior management.
7) Reasonable hike.
8) Cab service.

Cons

1) Office position at NOIDA.
2) I don't have anymore.

Advice to Senior Management

Best of luck...

Pros

Good work life balance for the most part. Friendly and smart people, many of whom have worked in Cadence for many years and know their stuff very well.

Cons

The company is in an industry that has been stale for years. New value propositions are difficult. The end result is most R&D are doing maintenance work and bug fixing for very old code, rather than building something new and exciting.

Like other EDA companies, the company didn't view itself as a software company for a long time and doesn't have good software practice. The software is not well tested or peer reviewed, is somewhat difficult to work with and can be bug prone. Fixing old bugs often leads to new ones and there are no company-wide enforced procedures to prevent that.

Compensation used to be good. Now it is still somewhat around average, but hasn't kept pace with non-EDA software or semi companies that are doing well in the valley in recent years.

Advice to Senior Management

Experiment into adjacent areas. Think outside the box and grow customer base out of traditional semi companies. Put more effort into hiring and appreciation of employees. Believe it or not, Pure bug fixing work in EDA is not more exciting than writing code in a general software company even for someone with EDA background. They need other motivations to stay around. Learn software practice 101 from other large software companies and introduce standard QA practice so that R&D can focus on building new stuff.

Pros

Can be relaxing or challenging depending on you want to take it. A very small percentage of people is doing the majority of work (more so than other companies)

Cons

Senior management allowed useless/incompetent and/or ineffective managers stick around, which created an inefficient environment and bad examples to other employees.

Advice to Senior Management

Should strive for efficiency and effectiveness

Pros

Great people
Good tools
interesting, diversified work
fair compensation
good benefits
design engineers are very team oriented

Cons

very poor people recognition for employees by upper management
weak advancement opportunity
poor upper management

Pros

Deploying cutting edge technology
A leasder in their field

Cons

Failed busuness models on various product lines at the wrong economic time cause many problems. Testing of software before deployment is a weak spot.

Advice to Senior Management

Do not allow AE's to be the testing unit for software as it is attempting to be deployed.

Pros

-Great Live/Work Balance
-Management Support is unparalleled
-Great University Program to learn and grow
-Lots of room to find your ideal manager to work for

Cons

-Very Political
-Lots of posturing and positioning for very little activity
-IT is flat our infuriating to work with

Advice to Senior Management

Reduce your upper management and focus on your customers more

Pros

The ONLY positive thing I can say about working @ Cadence are the people. There is a bounty of extremely intelligent & personable individuals in which I have had the pleasure to collaborate. Sadly the good ones are either laid off or leave.

Cons

1) The dead weight of employees who have been here for eons. 10, 15, 20, 30 years Individuals who bring nothing new to the table and are void of fresh new ideas to advance Cadence. It's a mystery why some of them have been retained through several company RIFs.
2) An Executive Management Team who are more concerned about bottom line figures and not the human toll brought on by their haphazard decision making.
3) A company focused more on Marketing than the technical aspects of the product line.

Advice to Senior Management

Entire EMT should quit and make room for competent individuals focused on the success of the ENTIRE company and not just for their own personal gain.

Pros

Plenty of knowledgeable people to work with in a great team environment. The benefits are great but the salary could be more competitive.

Cons

Stock options need to be given more frequent and how merit and promotions are given need to be readdressed. Management needs to do more to retain employees.

Advice to Senior Management

Although the economy has been challenging, more needs to be done to reward employees and incentivize the top employees to stay with the company.

Pros

Management support and trust. Peers respect each other, collaborative, teamwork is fairly good

Cons

middle management can be more slim

Pros

reasonable work load, good technology, equipment to work with. people are nice and well-educated. get all-around technologies. friendly working environment. good off-work facilities.

Cons

Too much politics, upper management are technical deficient. company is purely marketing driven, need to get r&d more involved in marketing decisions.

Advice to Senior Management

management should get more involved in real technical work to improve your products. use the right people, not the right races.