Vantaggi
Very competent at core business of integrated circuit design and development - semiconductors. ADI makes great IC products and employees work hard, get excellent results, and are proud of the quality. When the global economy is happy, the bonuses are very good. Most software professionals are in the 15% bonus tier, which multiplies up to 3x in good economic times like the last couple years. Good 401K match. You can negotiate for stock and signing bonuses if they make you a job offer. You can negotiate for more vacation too (see #2 con below). There are a lot of smart, nice people and colleagues are usually very helpful and friendly even if you don’t know them and you are introducing yourself to ask for their time on something. Approval of the CEO and executive team is genuine. The overall direction of the company is supported broadly by employees. You do not hear many complaints about the executive level team and their decisions. Internal transfers are common and it’s a good way to get experience in more than one area inside a big company. It is possible to find good software teams within groups mostly making hardware. If you are interviewing on a team with people who have been actual software engineers for 20 years, you’re in a good place.
Svantaggi
#4: Low base salaries. #3: Forced vacation use at specific times of year. We were all forced to take the last week of August off without much notice. Try to negotiate around that in your contract. #2: Lots of overtime and wasted time due to bad management at the director level. #1 con. The competence and health of teams that build software at ADI is so inconsistent. There are internal hardware guys or some other internal ADI guys who have never worked on production or commercial software ever, who are given a very senior role “leading” a software team. It doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t work. When the team under a guy like this gets put together, obviously ADI recruiters only hire sw engineers with actual experience. It’s a bad combination of teammates who know what they should be doing but can’t do it because they get blocked, delayed, blamed, and demoralized by unqualified, unaccountable, “software directors”. These directors are functionally incapable of providing appropriate professional growth experience and guidance to their direct reports. Junior teammates are exposed to backward, counterproductive, non-standard ways of doing things that leave them under-prepared as candidates when they eventually want to go elsewhere. Senior teammates feel crushed. Many excellent software engineers have given up on ADI and quit because of this even when we were collecting fat bonuses. Executive level steps have been taken in the past year to help ADI learn how to do software, but so far this has not led to any clear improvements, although the main guys in charge of that seem well qualified and hardworking. If you’re a software engineering candidate at ADI, look up the group director on LinkedIn and see if he ever worked as a SWE at a software company. Set your weird bs detector to max and ask questions that should be low-balls. Ask how he got started in software. Ask to see a couple backlog items. Who does the UI design? Who writes the requirements? How is the software tested? What roles and ratios exist on the team? Is that how the team operates today or is it a target? How do you set team goals? (If it relates to being in sync with the silicon/hardware deliverables, that’s a good sign. My ratings are based on the whole company. Software is a fraction of our work. Other things work much more smoothly.