Work is not challenging: ARM, by its own admission (and driven by its business model), makes portions of the SoC that are NOT differentiators. This is not the company that goes for the last ball six kind og approach. Solid engineering but the stuff is dull.
In a CPU design company, if your site does not do CPU design you are a nobody in the pecking order. ARM Bangalore does not do design. We work on a lot of projects but they are Cambridge/Austin/Sophia/Sheffield (abbreviated as CASS) projects. Not your own. Net result there is very little opportunity to show your skills (and learn more and build depth). It has been made fairly clear that India will not be doing any design work (I presume this is forever since the answer is the same regardless of when the question is asked)
Several times the reason cited (with no real evidence to back it) is that India does not have design engineers - only verification, software, and implementation folks!! On the other hand when deciding to locate a job function in Cambridge or Taiwan the company is ok with hiring people from other geographies and moving them to the new location with work visas!! A failed design project in India is cited as a reason why India cannot do design - though all other sites have had failures and delays as well. Basically the company does not believe enough in India to locate a critical function here.
Folks from other sites that do CPU design may be rude, take you for granted, take credit for your work, or make statements that are not true about the work executed from India. They are not required to produce evidence to back claims. Their word will hold. Not everyone is that way but there are more than a small number of bad apples, including repeat offenders. Local management fall into two categories - do not know how to politically fight back, do not care. So you will get no support if you find yourself dealing with such a colleague
If someone in CASS think you are doing an excellent job then thats all counts. All you may be doing is the equivalent of scrubbing the floor. But as long as you are willing to do crappy work for them they will give you good feedback on appraisals. If you do any kind of innovative contributions yourself it _may_ not be recognised unless of course it is blessed by someone abroad.
Given the above issues, growth on the technical path in India above principal engineer is unlikely (not impossible we have a few). A Fellow is impossible. We have very few of those outside of Cambridge.
