MathWorks reviews

4.3

88% would recommend to a friend

(2,558 total reviews)
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Jack Little

94% approve of CEO

86% positive business outlook

MathWorks has an employee rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars, based on 2,558 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The MathWorks employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

3K reviews
1.0
May 1, 2013
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

OThers will review on the pros. Let me focus on Cons.

Cons

First of all it is surprising to me that company has so many 5 start ratings from current employees, as if they have be asked to improve the company image. Company hierarchy - The company has increased 10 folds in last 13 years. So all those who have been here more than 10 years (competent or not) have moved into management positions. They are enjoying without doing much work, taking big salaries and making sure that they will retire here. There have been cases where people had to loose their jobs if they pissed off these managers (obviously the reason was shown to be something else). Senior management on the other hand is all about profits and doesn't care much about bad things happening in the company. There is no process here wherein you can anonymously complain about someone especially your manager. All you can do is talk to his manager, and guess what will happen. Work from Home Policy - You can only work from home 3 times a year. Even if you are 1 hour late, your manager expects you to tell how you will make up for that. On the other hand some people come to office only for 6 hours a day and spend most time chatting in corridors. This is ridiculous for a Software Company. Review Process - Every year all managers sit inside a closed room and start fighting like dogs for a fixed number of ratings for their direct reports. They have an excel sheet on which every QE is listed. That decides your salary increase. A street smart employee even though not productive gets the rating increase especially if his manager is aggressive in these meetings. On other hand a hard working and highly productive employee will not get a rating increase since not too many managers know his name and his manager is not aggressive. That's why street smarts make lots of presentations and make sure that every manager knows their name. If you are waiting for the right time for your promotion, it will never come. 1 month after the ratings are set, the review process starts, wherein you write your review, your manager writes your review and some peer quotes. These are just a formality since your rating has already been decided. (You should ask this question about review process if you interview here.) I have seen really smart and productive people stay at same position for years or leave the company while a incompetent butt licker gets promoted. This company with 3000 employees has lots of politics at play. It also has high attrition rate. In Quality Engineering the situation is worse. You many be doing a fanstatic job and be appreciated by all the development, but if QE managers don't know you, best of luck. That's why your manager will ask you to make lots of presentations and not worry about doing your work since he alone cannot give you a high rating. Product Quality - Management always talk about importance of fixing the bugs but there are senior development managers who discourage finding bugs in the product since it makes their team look bad. They might be asked questions as to why there are so many bugs being found. Even if there are bugs in the safety critical code generation products, they convert them into enhancements just to look good in eyes of senior-most management. Salary raise - Company makes huge profits and still pay increase is usually under 5% citing bad economy(that too if you are doing good). In end, company has the motto of "do the right thing" but all management does is what's good for them. This company has too many processes to follow. Every time middle level management tries blaming their incompetency to the lack of processes, they come up with a new process to follow. In all, the company has is my way or highway.

2.0
May 9, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

1. Some part of the outside world thinks you are working on a well-known product 2. If you are interested specifically in using MATLAB/Simulink to solve MATH/Engineering problems, you might enjoy the job 3 Good work life balance, you are working based on fixed schedule, no flexibility but also no over time 4. There are many smart and nice people work here 5. Part of the benefit is good, e.g. 401K match, unlimited sick days, and there are some nice small perks

Cons

The cons part is only for EDG, and more specifically it is for the experience of computer science people in EDG 1. MathWorks’ pay to ASE role might not be that bad comparing to many mid to small size companies, but it is still much lower than most large software companies 2. If your career goal is to do software development, don’t give a very high expectation on EDG program, because it is mainly a technical support role. EDG is part of the technical support department, and your technical support job always has higher priority than all of your other tasks in EDG. Most of the managers will purposely avoid this fact when they talk to you before you join. 3. MathWorks is an extremely procedural company, so for anything you do, there is going to be some step-by-step documentations, which is good for many people. However, for some reason they never make the procedure of transferring out of EDG to development role unclear. The time you spend at EDG actually depends on the number of opening positions in the other parts of the company, and they do over hire sometimes. When this happens, again your manager will avoid the fact and tell you to not focus on if there are any open positions, but focus on improve yourself so an opportunity will come to you. 3. The performance review process is very unclear and inconsistent. The performance rating is from 1 to 6 points, and I have seen someone got praised by his manager and promised to get a raise, while someone from the same team with a rating just 0.5 lower got warned by the same manager that his career is at risk. 4. Most of the managers are not from the appropriate technical background, so do not expect they can help you much from the technical perspective. The management is highly technical support oriented, and if you say you have a degree from computer science and you are very good at software development, your skills will not be much appreciated here. 5. The expected amount of bonus for new hires listed on the hiring material that HR gave to me was way higher than the bonus I actually received, and since all new hires get the same amount of bonus regardless of the performance, the information from HR was just not true. 6. Some actions from the management are questionable in term of the work ethics. Managers use the threat of not filing working visa application to push engineers.

2.0
May 10, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- All the perks: 401k, insurance, gym, etc. - Friendly colleagues. - Company outings and anniversary celebrations. - Free Wednesday breakfast and Friday cookies.

Cons

No opportunity for growth! As a mid-size private company with no real competitors MathWorks operate on the principle of "business as usual", meaning you stay at same engineering level and the same performance rating for a long time, until or unless you get lucky! The promotions are a joke! With sophisticated and secretive formulas for level/rating calculations, you're guaranteed to get the same gross salary or maybe less even if are promoted! Basically if you're promoted to a higher level your performance rating is reset so you have a higher nominal salary but a much smaller contribution from the profit sharing pool because of lower performance rating. Needless to point out that once at the higher level, rating icreases are harder and slower than before. The review process is another joke! Once a year you write a self review and a peer review (which the peer will get to read with your name on it). Your manager also writes a review. But a couple of weeks before you write your self review and your manager writes his, higher ups meet to determine promotions and ratings. So you're writing a review after everything is decided! I wonder why the call it "review"! So what you write and what your manager writes are essentially used to justify pre-determined ratings! I thought it's should be the other way around! If in a team of say 10 engineers the performance of two engineers exceed expectations only one is promoted because two will exceed the promotion quota for the team! So one is promoted and the other one has to suck it up for another year until his names is thrown into the hat again! This is the mechanism behind lower than industry average salaries and the lazy culture. A few years ago I expected the competition with open source to make a dent but that was wishful thinking!!

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