Cadence Design Systems Reviews in Chelmsford, MA

I worked at Cadence Design Systems

Pros – The compensation for individual contributors is generous compared to other high tech companies. Employees are treated well and the benefits package is good. There is a free on-site fitness center offered to all employees.

Cons – Career advancement training opportunities for individual contributors is scarce. The company tends to be top-heavy with management. The executive staff is over-compensated based on company performance. There is a tendency to export US jobs overseas to help the bottom line.

Advice to Senior Management – Lose some chiefs and hire more indians (but not in India, China, or Russia).

I worked at Cadence Design Systems full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – The coworkers were enjoyable and mostly good natured. The payscale was quite good even though there were frequently pay/hiring freezes and no bonuses.

Cons – As a very senior software engineer, we were supplied with very old, slow and inadequate computers and ancient code. Getting a second monitor was considered a luxury. There's an old-guard, don't change anything mentality where presenting new ideas many time is considered disruptive. Vacations/Shutdowns are strictly enforced during specific times of the year, and new employees were required to borrow against future years. Design/development process is rigid, non-agile and counter productive. Layers of specification approvals were required before any work or prototyping could begin. As a developer, the spec reviews were over attended, sometimes contentious and provided little assurance that you would be developing what was actually required since the attendees almost never came prepared (well, in the 6 years I was there I never had one where everyone who "just had to attend" was prepared).

Advice to Senior Management – I've seen managers/department heads there who had never worked anywhere but Cadence. The couldn't relate to any development processes other than the ones that had been in place for 12-15 years. Sad really. No attempts at improving the build/test reliability or refactoring old code could gain any traction with this management. I've never worked anywhere before or since where I was assigned a bug backlog of over 1400 bugs assigned to me the day I joined and that was in addition to the new development tasks. Other group members had similar bug backlogs.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend