Arm reviews

As many products are matured, not many challenges nor opportunities for growth. Self serving management, constant reorg only to promote managers. Many managers, sometimes it is hard to figure out some managers function. Although a global company, lack of awareness among managers and engineers about this fact and have unfair expectations on behaviour and communication(English) irrespective of people's origin, unconscious/conscious bias is seen. Key to career progression is visibility, visibility and visibility. Being difficult to work with and micro management gets you recognition. Lots of useless process, using of Agile where it is not suitable for example.

My following comments come from the vast majority of my collegues, its not just my opinion. - No lateral movement within the company. Near impossible. Managers and HR will say the right things but its just not true (dont believe them). Only a single colleague I know of was approved to move to another team. The funny thing is that he actually had to wait two plus years after the approval to be able to move and that only happened because he threaten to quit ARM. Even within a single team, this happens. Eg. the "fetch guy" will keep working on fetch unit, he'll rarely get to do anything else (loadstore, commit, etc). Why does this happen? Cause management only cares about results; moving laterally is just risk for them, not growth. They acknowledged this two-three years ago (at least on a couple of teams) by asking employees what they wanted to work on but nothing happened. Colleagues are still doing the same thing. - Moving vertical is just as hard, if not harder. Its hard to get promoted. Even after "exceptional" reviews many ppl dont get promoted. This is because your promotion candidacy goes to a panel made up of many leads across several different teams. If they havent heard from you, you are screwed. Its just not fair and many friends complain about the process w no changes. - Staff/principal engineers keep doing what they do best, lots of cool stuff, and they pad themselves on their backs. Meanwhile, lower grade engineers are stucked with the 'extra' stuff even though you could argue they are just as qualified to do the more interesting work. - No free food, no free coke products, and a unclean-low-grade, soap-like, starbucks-wanna-be coffee (we tried to get a better local Austin coffee but request got rejected by facility manager even after presenting survey results showing everybody in the sute preferred the local one). - The cafeteria is "subsadicied" but its still better to just go and eat somewhere else given their prices/quality.