Great environment and work-life balance; salaries could be higher
Pros
- Great work-life balance - Rational environment. No politics. - Performance is rewarded. My salary was raised 70% in 5 years with very good performance scores. - Pretty much every one gets his own office (in the Natick headquarters). - The company is very stable and profitable. You don't ever have to worry about the MathWorks going out of business. - Job security, people don't get fired for no good reason. - Great opportunity to work on software development while reusing domain-background on an engineering or scientific discipline.
Cons
- The starting salary is below market average for CS and ECE degrees. Other disciplines though (e.g., Mechanical) may not have this problem. - The Boston area has expensive housing and cold winters. - The introductory program (boot camp / EDG) may overpromise that internal transfer can take place anywhere you want. This can of course happen (it happened to me), but it depends on internal openings. If the economy is bad, or if no new openings are created in your #1 target area, then you may be stuck or eventually transfer to a less preferred team. This can be more of a problem for ECE/Mechanical graduates that may wish to reuse a specific background that they have from school. CS graduates have so many options that they do not have to worry (for example multiple teams may be working with a specific language). - The company has a lot of processes and some people may think that progress is slow. The company is very consensus driven; this is not necessarily bad, but if you want to be working alone in your office without interacting with people for weeks, this is not a good match for you. - You can work from home for at most 3 days a year. Some people don't like this.