Arm reviews

My following comments come from the vast majority of my collegues, its not just my opinion. - No lateral movement within the company. Near impossible. Managers and HR will say the right things but its just not true (dont believe them). Only a single colleague I know of was approved to move to another team. The funny thing is that he actually had to wait two plus years after the approval to be able to move and that only happened because he threaten to quit ARM. Even within a single team, this happens. Eg. the "fetch guy" will keep working on fetch unit, he'll rarely get to do anything else (loadstore, commit, etc). Why does this happen? Cause management only cares about results; moving laterally is just risk for them, not growth. They acknowledged this two-three years ago (at least on a couple of teams) by asking employees what they wanted to work on but nothing happened. Colleagues are still doing the same thing. - Moving vertical is just as hard, if not harder. Its hard to get promoted. Even after "exceptional" reviews many ppl dont get promoted. This is because your promotion candidacy goes to a panel made up of many leads across several different teams. If they havent heard from you, you are screwed. Its just not fair and many friends complain about the process w no changes. - Staff/principal engineers keep doing what they do best, lots of cool stuff, and they pad themselves on their backs. Meanwhile, lower grade engineers are stucked with the 'extra' stuff even though you could argue they are just as qualified to do the more interesting work. - No free food, no free coke products, and a unclean-low-grade, soap-like, starbucks-wanna-be coffee (we tried to get a better local Austin coffee but request got rejected by facility manager even after presenting survey results showing everybody in the sute preferred the local one). - The cafeteria is "subsadicied" but its still better to just go and eat somewhere else given their prices/quality.

BURN OUT. If you are an RTL/Verification/Performance Engineer, then you now have to balance between working on multiple projects. When I first joined, engineers talked about life outside of Arm. Now all they talk about is how busy they are with no end in sight. A team that used to do monthly team lunches completely stopped and less time is spent improving the processes when we need it more than ever. Going away lunches for engineers who have been at Arm for 15+ years are more common than team lunches. ATTRITION. Top engineers are leaving including fellows. All of them are leaving to higher paying companies and HR and upper management said they have no plans to change our compensation because “people leave managers” and “no one mentioned compensation on their exit interview.” INNOVATION DECLINE. That feeling of starting work on a new project is gone. Projects are now just adding features on existing designs. There’s no time to rewrite things that are out of date or to revisit things that could be worth improving upon.