Innovative, Growing and Positive, but also Siloed and Slogging through internal transition
Pros
Autodesk produces products you can be proud of and is committed to making an impact for customers and on the world around us. Autodesk works hard to be ethical and takes extra steps to 'walk the talk'. Autodesk makes the tools that people use to design and make.... well, everything. Internally, that's a source of genuine pride. From an employee perspective, Autodesk tries very hard to treat people with respect, adhere to its published values and - when push comes to shove, STICK to those values... unlike some other Bay Area companies that might be more willing to compromise their stated values (e.g.: 'don't be evil' ..... ). Autodesk is in the midst of a huge transition: from perpetual license to subscription, from desktop to cloud, from narrow function applications to end-to-end integration, from a loose collection of complementary point products to platform company. It's interesting, but also exhausting, don't even think of interviewing here if you honestly regard your work-ethic as anything but "HIGH" and "Driven". It can be very rewarding, the over-all strategy makes sense and progress toward those mid-term and long-term goals is undeniable. Autodesk does not just talk.... we DO. All-in, if you are smart, talented, hard-working and really give a damn about what your work contributes to, Autodesk may be fore you.
Cons
Autodesk is 40 years old and going through a mid-life transformation. Every infrastructure system is in transformation; products are at various stages of their transition to Cloud enablement, and the drive to be a platform company is ( finally ) real this time. Entry-level positions do a lot of transaction volume and there's some question about whether compensation is competitive. Mid-level positions work relentlessly - that's driven both by the internal pace of change as well as business growth - be prepared. There are politics at play in Director-level and above; and it's an internal joke that 'nothing is guaranteed but death, taxes and Autodesk re-organizations'. the Alphabet soup of Org acronyms coupled with the reorganization of the quarter makes it tough to know who does what. As Autodesk has grown it has become more corporate, and it's easy to play "Buzzword Bingo" with the Org announcements and scope changes. Product divisions don't understand the infrastructure that runs the company, and are the worst communicators I've ever seen in terms of sharing their product plans with the upstream and downstream groups who will bear the workload of their decisions. The customer experience is complex, and end customers frequently become frustrated but the experience of simply accessing and managing their software investments. The company has a habit of doing 3X yearly employee surveys but does not always honestly assess what employees are telling them, and it feels like Autodesk will put more effort into 'spinning' the survey results than addressing the raised issues. H.R. support is weak after a recently departed H.R. V.P. gutted the department and tried to turn it into a ticket-driven, self service support function and I doubt those folks have time to breathe. Still, every company has challenges and Autodesk's heart is in the right place. We're on a journey to be better, and that's made tougher by the span and rate of change, as well as the rapid growth of recent years - but things are trending up.
