Parametric Technology Reviews

Pros

Talented employees.
Ability to move between development teams or organizations.
Fun, casual and relaxed work environment.
Promotes work life balance.
Ability to work remotely.
Great front-line management who care.
Employee development and career progress is emphasized.
Good benefit structure.
Collaboration is encouraged, no knowledge hoarding.

Cons

Salary below market.
Continual reorganization of upper/senior management and business units.
Reactionary policies to market and economic trends.
Process heavy about front-line management.
Globally diverse teams creates small windows to allow for 1-1 communication.
Continually changing company vision and re-branding creating confusion.

Advice to Senior Management

Be less reactionary to economic conditions and more proactive and conservative in approach. This has gotten better with the new CEO but is still apparent. Similarly, senior management needs to be less concerned about shareholder value and more concerned about employee satisfaction.

Pros

Great work/life balance with a wonderful headquarter location that includes a gym, on-site cafeteria and parking garage. PTC values its employees highly and allows for a perfect life/work balance. Flexible management with a laid back attitude.

Cons

Workload can sometimes be boring and slow. Departments tend to communicate internally, and because of this it might be hard to explore a career advancement within another department outside your own.

Advice to Senior Management

Ask for employee feedback

Pros

- Flextime
- Reasonable pay/benefits (industry average)

Cons

- Management
- Layoffs, dismissals to improve bottom line, stock price
- Once a industry leader, shadow of itself with new management more focused on short term profit
- Watch out if you are bought by them, the Bobs will enter soon (yes very much like Office Space)

Advice to Senior Management

- Employees make the company, respect them

Pros

PTC has much more advancement opportunities and breadth of solution offerings than my prior employer who was acquired by PTC. There are many positives in working for a $1B+ size company. It is big, but not as big as IBM where I also worked and felt like a cog in the machine.

Cons

The acquisition period has been a bit challenging, but I believe that over time the integration of my former employer into the PTC product portfolio will result in a better overall product offering to our customers and prospects.

Pros

Great product strategy, strong sales environment, diversity in opportunities

Cons

Political environment and at times, self interests are served for company, employees or shareholders.

Advice to Senior Management

More promotion based on performance

Pros

Good people, good technology
, regular paycheck, decent benefits

Cons

pay raises below inflation rate. upper management cares about profits only. regular layoffs to counteract falling stock price. upper management makes decisions in "vacuum" then expects employees to follow poorly planned initiatives.

Advice to Senior Management

ptc has enough vp's. give employees REAL raises and bonuses.

Pros

I've gotten to use a lot of different tools not talked about in school. I was given the freedom to choose what type of work I wanted to do.

Cons

In my experience, it's been that you are confined to your team. As a whole, PTC seems a little reluctant to move forward with new technologies.

Pros

A great Sales company, every person in the company is focused on supporting sales people and their efforts to sell solutions.

Cons

Can be a little short sighted in terms of customer relationships and building long relationships vs. short term gains which can lead to disgruntled customers.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on long term mutually beneficial relationships with customers. Continue to compensate your sales people well for bringing in extraordinary amounts of revenue.

Pros

Stable company - have handled the downturn in the economy well
Decent benefits
Customers are on the leading edge of technology

Cons

Politics - lots of politics
Outsourcing - there is always the threat of being outsourced
Silo'd - all organizations are in silos and communication is poor between them

Advice to Senior Management

Opening up the lines of communication between departments would help. Also, individual team goals seem to be aligned to looking good, not help our customers.

Pros

The starting pay is competitive, but don't expect it to rise.

Cons

Terrible. People will not return your calls if they don't feel you have anything to offer in return. The culture is worse than Congress, favors are counted and traded like commodities. Full of long-timers who hold their offices and responsibilities sacred and are unwilling to change. Any suggestions for improvement are treated as threats and result in manipulative backstabbing.

Yearly reviews rank you against your immediate peers, not against the goals that you've met for your department and company. So, if you're an exceptional employee and are on a team of exceptional employees you may be ranked low and passed over for a merit increase or promotion. Extremely unfair.

Overall it's a business run like a frat house and if you don't kiss up you'll get kissed off.

Advice to Senior Management

Trim the fat and remove the entrenched executive level who are full of bad habits learned from their predecessors. Fresh blood and a fresh perspective are the only hope for this company.