Align Technology reviews

Speaking to C++ engineers here--Do not be fooled by job ads which say things like "Create numerical geometrical algorithms and implement in C++" and talk about math, geometry, etc. If you pick up a position like the one I vacated, your work here will be nothing of the kind. Rather you will work for SQA, writing scripts or other testing tools, tracking down other teams' bugs, and maybe once in a while a few lines of C++ to support the existing pipeline. Everything cool seems to be always done by someone else. It *used* to be the job the advertisements describe--we built things, and it was good. But management vision changed early in 2017 and it's all about testing now. Not fun, not growing your skills in any direction you care about. Relatedly, no clear technical track. Even much smaller companies do this better. Management style is oppressively 'agile'. Your years of experience and particular expertise mean nothing; all that matters is being nice. Easily >1hr meetings/day. You are just a particularly expensive machine, replaceable and predictable. That last part is explicitly the Agile ideal, ask management. Ridiculously lax management in certain ways. People are put on patent discovery documents who made no contribution to the project, just showed up at an early meeting. Teammates skip work without consequence; sometimes with hilariously weak excuses, sometimes with none at all.

The culture is terrible. Very disrespectful atmosphere, and not collaborative. A LOT of gossip, and working in silos