Mentor Graphics Reviews in Portland, OR Area

Pros

Very nice work culture
great people to work with

Cons

Hard to advance career due to very flat organization structure

Advice to Senior Management

Encourage the fresh grads to take a more important role in the business

Pros

- Some great Engineers work in the RET/OPC support space

Cons

- Inexperienced Management
- 55+ yr olds, who think of themselves as GODS work here.
- All except three in this group is a young and innovative Engineer.
- No innovation
- Politics everyday
- Poor, inexperienced manager and director.
- Primary cause of loss of business in the IC space

Advice to Senior Management

Please re-evaluate the support CAEs who have been working since 25+ year. They have no clue how the world outside has changed. No creativity, innovation or room for improvement. Stubborn, hard-headed, in-compatible CAEs work in this group.

Pros

You will get to work with very high calibre people and tools. Work environment is mostly professional. Plenty of learning opportunities and possibilities for lateral moves. Great on-site gym and cafeteria. Teams are not overly spread around the globe. Salaries are competitive.

Cons

Work can be more tedious than interesting. Many people have 15+ years tenure with the company and they get first pick. The occasional ass will treat you like the rookie that you are no matter what you can bring. Culture can be overly conservative, an overreaction from the 8.0 fiasco. Not the place for the most modern coding practices. Not the most competitive work culture against start-ups. Partly because the tools are mature, the work is more on maintenance and incremental changes. As a consequence a lot of innovation is from acquisition. Many people do not realize how good they have it and are way too laid back. Harder to attract talents because not the #1 name.

Advice to Senior Management

Could focus on promoting company to attract talent.

Pros

good amount of vacation (although they reduced it)
nice facilities
everyone has an office
good benefits
pay is probably better than it should be for most people there
bonuses can be good, but the process of determining them is usually "gamed" and you never have a clue what is going to happen.

Cons

tons of office politics
middle managers abuse their power
difficult to move around within the company
underskilled workers who are full of themselves, and overly impressed by their own abilities

I worked at Mentor for quite a few years, but in the last few years, things suddenly got a lot worse. The amount of office politics is just staggering, and completely shut off the ability to get work done and create products. It was all about middle management and building their little castles, and who liked whom, and who got credit for what, and whose idea things were, blah blah blah. At the end, we had managers telling others not to talk to various people on the team, belittling, insulting, and cussing out people in meetings, completely throwing out the peer review process, and doing reviews based on what they alone "thought about the person" (i.e., whether the person brown-nosed enough) etc. It's just an absolute madhouse there, I've never encountered anything quite like it (thank goodness) in my professional life.

Advice to Senior Management

You guys need to hold your middle management accountable and quash all the office politics. You'd be surprised how many people you have there whose only interest is in self-promotion, not the company.

Pros

People are friendly and cooperative. A great campus with on-site cafeteria, gym, basketball court, library, and child care facility. Private offices for everyone, generous vacation time, and good benefits.

Cons

Layoffs happen frequently and are usually handled poorly - everyone finds out through the grapevine but management pretends nothing happened.

Pros

good work life balance
encourages training
internship program
beautiful facilities
individual offices - little or no cubicles
fast paced enviornment
diverse work enviornment
good compensation

Cons

lack of employee advocacy through out HR team. All HR issues are left to managers and HR only called in for termination and documentation of disciplinary actions.
constant changing of strategy within HR team

Advice to Senior Management

Your employees do not feel that there is an internal resource to assist them when situations arise. HR should not simply protect the company but successful HR teams can also foster a secure and open door policy through out their divisions.

Pros

1. work life balance
2. friendly people, good atmosphere
3. good benefits, decent salary

Cons

1. few opportunities to grow
2. political

Advice to Senior Management

let people take risks and grow

Pros

Amazing campus, family atmosphere, flexible work time, work/life balance. There is possibility for career advancement if you work hard for it and pay attention to your own career. Being professionally aggressive doesn't necessarily pay off here but you have to be ready to capitalize on available opportunities when they come up (which isn't often because people stay in their jobs for a very long time). Management in my organization is very accessible and I feel pretty open to employee idea contribution. As a parent, Mentor Graphics has been a really great place to work.

Cons

There are a large number of people settled in to their positions who don't seem to be interested in professional movement or innovation - sometimes that attitude weighs on those of us who want to excel. It seems impossible to fire anyone at Mentor. Please make sure you get paid what you are worth when you are hired, while it is possible to get decent raises and promotions once you are hired on it isn't easy (I've heard some coworkers complain they haven't had increases in years!).

Advice to Senior Management

If you can, consider shaking the foundations a little bit and cutting loose some dead weight. There isn't anything wrong with a little professional competition, please try to bring in some new achievers!

Pros

Learn a lot from the job since they hire very smart employees. Every employee gets his own room with pretty powerful workstation. 24 vacation days per year is fabulous. Work life balance is excellent.

Cons

There is a lot of bad legacy code in the project i worked in which crippled development of new features.

Advice to Senior Management

Communicate important information to employees more proactively.
Need better co-operation between different groups.

Pros

15 days flexible day off.
Easy to get help from other project divisions or groups if needed.
Work culture is generally good as many of the offices and R&D centers are in Various countries like, USA, France, India , UK and Egypt and generally easy to communicate and get replies from remote sites.

Cons

Difficult to get raise or promotion or move to the next level.
Benefits package is not that great.
Management does not stick to their decisions sometimes.
Company is top heavy and too many account managers, project managers , managers for small accounts.
Many managers work remotely and not accessible in person.
Managers /AE's waste too much money in travel.

Advice to Senior Management

Cut down too many managers.