MathWorks reviews

Completely development centric. No real authority as a Manager, but for managing individual contributors. Company focus on Quality, but this does not translate to better quality. Some senior managers are "untouchable" so things don't necessarily improve. Performance ratings not really set by managers; VPs can override. Managers have little say. Hard to get things done as a manager due to lots of politics. Many quality initiatives, but few have significant impact due to lack of adoption by teams that choose not to adopt quality initiatives. Flat QA organization: younger managers with 5 years of experience are at the same job level as those with 25+ years.

Heavy workload and lots of pressure. And the pressure only increases. Although I was ostensibly hired to build a new product, there was still a HUGE amount of maintenance to be done on the huge amount of existing code. Very strong culture. Which is a strength in some ways, but it also means that only a "certain kind of person" is a good fit. Are you that kind of person? Ask a lot of questions. And don't assume that MathWorks is uniformly great in all groups. Much of the code in my area (Simulink) was overly complex. Entire frameworks were created to insulate business logic from technology choices (e.g., Java implementation, Qt implementation). Result: a large amount of work was typically required to implement even the simplest feature. In my group, management did not have very good management skills. Running the new project seemed to be an "afterthought"...the top job was making all the bug-fix numbers. And the new project ended up getting canceled.