MathWorks Reviews

For seasoned highly skilled, master or doctorate level, qualified and experienced people: stay away as much as possible from MathWorks. The company does everything, according to the needs of the CEO and his "trusty" people direct under him. Those needs are usually driven by perpetual sense of power and control. That is shown to all the other people, in the form of the passive-aggressive form of : We are doing things our own way, because they worked so well for the past 40 yrs. Managers, wake up and remove your heads out of the sand (ostrich policy). Things have changed, and there are strong players in the industry which are blowing away MathWorks. If you think that you learn something and you will just join MathWorks to gain career skills... think again. All the processes are internally developed, with no application anywhere else ( Because they don't apply due to their "uniqueness"). They (processes) are mostly developed to accommodate and facilitate the upper management's controlling power (that power is eroded due to the the growing number of low paying programmers (they keep hirring) which need to be managed). MathWorks lacks the vision of the future, in a highly dynamic and growing market, where open source is becoming the norm and choice. The company refuses to see that reality due to the poor managers, whom have been working there for more than 18-25 years (in most cases this was their first job after their graduation) . These managers look after their personal interest. That is to get to the retirement age, with a fat check, while picking up the quarterly fat bonus, Also, if you interview for them and thinking to join MathWorks, understand that there are no promotions nor career growth. The title they give you is meaningless because they value seniority at the company. The more number of years you spend with them the more senior you are. That's why your previous experience will not count. 10 years spent within the company represent the "big threshold" to cross, to attain "tenure". Till then, you might notice that, some kid, who joined MathWorks 5 years ago, for a low paying job, is actually considered senior to you. The company is geared around and for developers and development management specifically. There are only few of them and they make all the decisions about the products. Interestingly, they never leave their offices and rarely talk to customers. Yet they plan and put in place the whole road-map of the product. They don't rely too much on actual market data, or marketing people recommendations, they mostly assume what is needed. To make matter worse, there are a lot of redundancies among various products, due to development managers' "turf wars". That comes from their trying to prove to the upper executive management, whom is worthy of their attention, by building "cool" products (mostly with little to no value to the customers). Marketing organization is "auxiliary" to the developers and is mostly asked to provide marketing (collateral) documents. The overall sense is that marketing is optional, as an internal organization and almost unnecessary. As a result, the development side is always mocking and deriding marketing and product management personnel. That attitude creates a stressful environment which leads most of the marketing people, to a demoralizing self-fulfilling attitude. If they try to advertise the quarterly bonus, during the interviewing stage... That bonus is very small, for the first 1-3 years. It grows slowly as you are during your "tenure track" and in the beginning you will effectively get somewhere 5-6%. It will be weighted heavily by the number of years spent at the company and its growths is extremely small from year to year for the first years. Most of the people with experience from previous jobs have left the company within 1-3 years due to all of the above reasons. The attrition rate for the experience people coming from outside is the highest. As a result the company is turning toward internships, helping to grow and mold the people according to company's interest.