Pros

not a bad place to work good people over all. There is a lot that can be improved but I do think that they have good products.

Cons

Lots of internal Polotics and power struggle. Need to chill out and enjoy the business again. Can be a great place just needs some movment.

Advice to Senior Management

Need some vision, focus and drive. There are many good things but they get over shadowed by the bad. You know you are better than that

Pros

It is the best of the companies to work for. It is the worst of the companies to work for. It all depends on where you end up in the company. MathWorks has two major product lines, one around MATLAB and one around Simulink. Both product lines are very successful and comprise the two halves of the revenue.

The engineering organization is built into two halves around these product lines and evolved very differently from each other. MATLAB has been a historically "Learn and Apply" tool where the market is composed of very large number of small accounts. Simulink has been positioned as a serious engineering design tool which caters to large accounts in automotive, aerospace etc.

I will compare and contrast these two halves and it turns out that, if you play your cards right, you can have a very nice life at MathWorks (just not a very successful one).

The MATLAB half is in general, really fun to work for. There are not much market pressures as MATLAB users are mostly students and one-off engineers for whom MATLAB serves very adequately. The time lines for getting anything done in this organization are truly geological. People spend one year researching the requirements and the next year documenting the design and the next in various design meetings and so on. The management is organically grown, which means the hard-working years are well into their past and they are allowed to coast and concentrate on finer things in life. The relaxed, hands-off management means there is even less pressure on the foot soldiers. The incredible focus on process (specs, design reviews etc.) enables a large number of highly incompetent engineers to hide behind the process to get very little done. It is no accident that this organization is filled with native English speakers who are better at talking than in doing. There have been innovations on the MATLAB side, but they are rare and they happened in spite of the system rather than because of it. The 90-10 rule applies very strongly here.

I do not have many good things to say about Simulink side, so let us move on to the cons.

Cons

Working on the Simulink side is brutal, mind-numbing and in general, career limiting as you will not be able to market these skills anywhere else. The management here is also organically grown and many of them do suffer from the same malady as their MATLAB counterparts, where they rest on the laurels earned in the 1990s. There are a few exceptions but they are just that, exceptions.

The upper management in this organization puts a lot of pressure on getting things done as fast as possible. Large projects are never allowed to even take off for the fear that they will never finish. The extreme risk-averseness made this organization extremely incremental in its approach. There are teams that add no more than a few check-boxes to their product in a release cycle, but as long as they ship something, the management is happy.

There is very little support or recognition for those who work on infrastructure and silently contribute to the products. Because of this, no talented engineer wants to work on infrastructure for fear of being marginalized. This meant that those who want to work on infrastructure full time are the lazy, talentless ones. This is causing this area to suffer a slow death which is certain to arrive in the next decade.

Advice to Senior Management

Force people to move between MATLAB and Simulink sides that creates cross-pollination of cultures.

Get rid of managers who merely push paper around as a technical organization like this deserves hands-on managers who can lift the burden of the whole team if needed. This is especially the case in quality engineering where the incompetent managers hired even more incompetent engineers under them.

The so-called foundation services such as usability and program management are chock full of inefficiency as they really have very little to do. When you walk by their offices, you will see them trading stocks, playing on Facebook, watching You Tube etc. They can all be replaced by hourly workers and we will lose nothing.

MathWorks has become like Microsoft, big, bloated, ineffective and unimaginative. It is probably because a lot of the processes at MathWorks are borrowed from Microsoft. We should find a way to become more like Apple or Google. It is easier said than done. One idea is to set up small teams within the company and give them carte-blanche on rewriting MATLAB and Simulink. Give them five years and a promise of a million dollars bonus each if they end up shipping in five years.

Pros

Some very good products and interesting work if you like technical stuff.
Salaries are competitive

Cons

A horrific corporate culture. Any risk taking (i.e., creativity) is frowned upon. Upper management has been the same for 20 years and many vps are over in way over their heads. They hide important information from the prez, and some sad decisions result.

The worst part of this place is that upper management knows everything, and you, the new employee, are to be "trained" (think of a Maoist reeducation camp). There is a profound lack of respect and trust in the average MathWorker.

Career development is nonexistent. If you ask for training, you'll likely be told to read a book. Since upper management has been the same for 2 decades, there's very little upward mobility. There's an inner circle of "jack's friends," and then there are the rest of us.

The Mathworks spews a lot of cant about values and respect, but it's all part of some cult-like illusion. Hypocracy is rife.

But, the place is very profitable. Like the line says, though, money doesn't talk, it swears. So, why change when you're making a ton of money? Only if you think people matter, and the Mathworks doesn't.

Advice to Senior Management

there is no advice management would listen to, so why bother?

Pros

Great platform for fresh graduates to learn
A decent amount of freedom to choose what you want to do

Cons

Downsides of this role, well after a year maybe your learning curve becomes stagnant and you want to move out of this role. Unfortunately, the organization is very conservative, so positions in your field of choice might not open up at all. You are literally wasting half of your time, doing Technical Support and talking to customers who mostly can't get anything done on their own.
More than half of the management is non-technical so they have no freaking idea of what they are talking about most of the time. Just smile and take it.
Huge disparity in pay scales for the same role. If you went to a branded school, you get a lot more than you deserve, performers are not rewarded aptly.

Advice to Senior Management

Not all of the managers are out of sync. The ones that can think in their reports' shoes should be used as examples to learn from.

Pros

Very relaxed and engaging atmosphere with great benefits and perks. It is a very stable company that is a leader in its market segment. It feels good to work on products that make a true difference in the world

Cons

Becoming very process driven, which invariably slows down the pace of work and can be very frustrating at times. The pace of career development is atrociously slow.

Advice to Senior Management

Management must do a much better job of explaining what factors go into promotion decisions and what career growth avenues are available - they tend to treat this information as a state secret, which makes no sense.

Pros

Pay and benefits are more than fair and it's been a strong compliment to ownership that not many people, if any, have lost their jobs. The building is modern, colorful, and comfortable.

Cons

I do believe that ownership cares about employees but strategic direction is lacking. If you think about it, how many companies have started out of a garage and 25 yrs later the same two people are running it? Even Bill gates, hired a CEO and Steve Jobs, well....he's Steve Jobs. The creepy thing about this place is that some of the people that go far back with the owner have a relationship that I don't trust. I would be careful about what and who I say anything to.

Advice to Senior Management

Start letting the people you hire make mid level decisions. I mean, are you serious? It wouldn't surprise me if Jack and Jean have meetings about what type of toilet paper to buy. Also, what do people do in these meetings all day? It's like Congress.

Pros

A few things I like about MathWorks are:

Great benefits
Friendly culture
Work-life balance
Challenging problems to solve

The CEO and upper management seem to be very engaged in the company.

Cons

This is a good company that has gone soft in the recent times and resembling a big corporation with rampant inefficiency. Given that the company is profitable, there do not seem to be revenue pressures on anyone. Coming from a startup prior to joining MathWorks, I am constantly surprised at the lack of accountability everywhere. In engineering, one can work on a feature for any length of time as long as the appropriate specification documents are generated on a regular basis. There is also a huge difference in the quality of engineers from one group to the other. Unfortunately, the groups that harbor mediocre engineers have mediocre leadership that is so entrenched because of their long tenure that this inefficiency gets protected and even nurtured.

Outside of engineering, there is even less accountability. There seem to be many jobs where people just show up at meetings, do not contribute in any meaningful manner and leave at the end of the day. You see them showing up at work at 10 and leaving at 4. Such sights are highly demotivating to a young, hardworking newcomer and makes it hard to pump oneself up for superior performance.

There seems to be quite a bit of abuse of flex-time where people claim to work from home. It makes marginal sense, if this is a software engineer who can theoretically do coding over VPN. However, you see those whose job is coordination (program management, usability, marketing) claiming to work from home on a regular basis.

Advice to Senior Management

Institute a culture of high productivity
Cut the fat that is permeating the company by getting rid of any job that has no deliverables beyond "setting up meetings"

Pros

Products are the best in their class. Management has a long-term and very ethical way of doing business. Developers and technical people get a lot of respect--maybe too much. Small, effcient teams of competent individuals. Very effective communication across the company via networking activities, intranet,etc. Results-oriented, factual, and quantitative management style. The MathWorks is a well-oiled machine which you will enjoy being a part of if you are (i) results-oriented, (ii) hands-on and pragmatic (iii) not overly creative (no time) or individualistic (iv) patient

Cons

Due to the heavily quantitative management style, people sometimes work to meet metrics and not always to meet customer needs. Tends to be very internally-focused. Extremely risk averse culture--sometimes to the point of stunting creativity and killing opportunities. Quite a bit of reporting and overhead for such a small company. A handful of developers have developed attitude problems, probably due to a combination of ego-inflation and stress.

Advice to Senior Management

Should consider a structured rotation program between development, application engineering, training, consulting, and tech support in international offices. This would make the sales force more sensitive to development constraints and would make developers more aware of the "real world" where their products are used.

Cross-product workflow and task-based design work needs to be taken much more seriously before deciding on feature goals for development teams.

Pros

Great lifestyle company. Gym classes at lunch, breakfast on wednesdays, cookies on fridays. summer outings, very cool company outings. Very stable. Relatively little politics.

Cons

It's so comfy no one leaves! This means little opportunity for advancement. 10-15-20 year awards are normal.

Advice to Senior Management

Na

Pros

Comfortable and easy going, not high stress
Flexible
Highly intelligent co-workers
Unique culture

Cons

Contradicting policies (visible vs. not visible)
A need to stay in the median value for everything
Lots of self promotion needed to get ahead, hard work is not enough
No "official" flex time

Advice to Senior Management

Break the rules for exceptional employees and let people know the "why" behind policy changes.