Mentor Graphics – “Excellent for a career start but beware of layoffs, very poor career advancement, stagnation, and unpopular technology”

Pros

-Multinational exposure.
-Good opportunty of frequent travelling to very nice parts of the world.
-Master working with geographically distributed teams.
-Acquire knowledge from veteran engineers (20-30 years of experience!) Vast opprtunities to watch and learn a solid software development lifecycle.
-Learning a very advanced quality control process and a very solid configuration managent process.
-Good benefits. Only tainted by poor choice of benefits providers; e.g. Allianz for saving plans, that blocks your saved money for more than 100 days after asking to collect your savings. Choice of BNPParibas for financial services to employees (the choice can't be any poorer). Besides, Stock Options is always underwater.
-Master dealing with different cultures.
-Very good work environment. While there is a new open area setup, still there is separate offices for senior engineers (single or double desks per room), making it the best setup in Egypt for similar companies.

Cons

-Having to cope with the poor skills for half of the senior management team in Egypt (technical, project management, and managerial areas).
-Learning outdated/unpopular technologies/applications. You can master TCL/TK, Ansi C, System C, VHDL, Lex & Yacc, electronic simulation, behavioral modeling, etc. Very interesting technologies but also very unpopular in the Egyptian market.
-Very poor career advancement opportunities. Poor professional development opportunities.
-High instability. Existence of strong restrictions to lateral moves, which when combined with the volatile business of EDA worldwide and its unpopularity in Egypt together with the small size of the Cairo site, results in recurrent layoffs in the Cairo office year after year. Eventually adopting a hire-and-fire policy; e.g. layoff (or Involuntary turnover) of whole teams like: IPD, IESD - twice, synthesis, CICD, etc. That was almost always followed next week by participation in employment fairs and publishing newspaper vacancy ads, seeking a different set of technical skills. Laid-off people were sometimes compensated with good, but below what is already granted by the Egyptian labor law, and at other times with much less or no severance package at all. In both cases this is always coupled with take-it or leave-it scare tactic.
-Frequently, but not always, treated as a low-priced/low-skilled workers through assigning only primitive tasks.
-Not entirely multinational in the sense that you can often hear statements like, "I'm not going to hire that person because she is a girl," or alike, often bragged about by some ill-educated senior managers.

Advice to Senior Management

With a PhD degree being virtually the only/decisive qualification for management positions in the Cairo site, combined with close to zero technology innovation in the Cairo site (whose activities is mostly focused on maintenace, support, and plain vanilla software development/implementation), the situation is like getting a fish to drive a train!