Arm reviews

The nature of the work and lack of previous attention to diversity in team building has led to a narrow set of types of people you get to interact with. I appreciate ARM is taking steps to address this with a Project Everyone programme - I've got involved and hoping to see the positive impact over time. ARM was formed in Cambridge for designing cpu's. These are not cons, but they weigh heavily as perceptual baggage. ARM is rising up as a company in many world wide locations, who can develop world class software and become dominant in IoT. Despite this Cambridge and hardware sometimes seem to be the perceived places you must be.

- A hot political mess and dysfunctional. Management injected into everything for the sake of it just because there is a requirement to double headcount. These people just pass the same message around all week in an infinite loop then go home at 3pm on Friday - Same amount of work before the buyout, less time given to do it, and with more people. Everyone is therefore competing for work and really doing very little, and being constantly monitored on every task. "We are AGILE" is the usual condescending excuse. - The revenue is NOT increasing, in fact it is dropping. But because of the acquisition this has enabled the internal structures to sneer at anyone who dare criticise how bad the culture is and promotions for all the "yes-men" who roll over for belly rubs. - Rampant presenteeism. Despite everyone doing very little work beyond the main flagship products, everyone needs to be at their desk a lot to make it seem like they are doing something. It's as if the executives could walk in any moment, but they are in the US polishing their new tesla. - Micro-management. Managers will be assigned to everything, they will now be dictating everything through their medieval torture tool known as JIRA. This has killed off every inclination for engineers to actually innovate, and led to pedantic workers and attrition of really well respected people. The solution is to over-hire graduates and just throw them into the fold. - Tribalism. Like any "diverse" culture you will just see pockets of a few specific nationalities. The older employees are less tribal but the constant dysfunction has made people inward thinking. This leads to a lot of clear bias if you have the misfortune of not being the correct nationality.