Autodesk reviews

This company is an old, old ship. A lot of the folks here have been here forever (10+ years) and are rooted in dated processes, unwilling to take feedback from new employees, until the new employees either quit or stay long enough to get absorbed in all those dated processes. As a younger employee, this can be intimidating - an older employee, who I introduced myself to in the kitchen one day, offhandedly told me that I probably wouldn't make it to the 4-year mark, as "millenials are noncommittal". As a designer, the work depends (understandably) on what team you're on- but being a part of a big company, you will be siloed, and a lot of the work won't be sexy visually. There's currently been a movement towards creating global UI guidelines but it's taken a very, very long time to develop and the team that is working on it hasn't permeated all of the design teams yet, it feels that any one team within the company doesn't have much reach across orgs. Generally not a huge design culture here - we host a lot of design events for the public, but internally, design thinking is still relatively new to non-designers and pushing that has been a challenge. The designers feel very disconnected, and there's often duplicate efforts happening and not a lot of communication. There have been efforts to bring us together; we have designer all-hands, but it feels that the original gusto has worn off. The company is very numbers and sales driven, and at times so ambitiously so that it costs our reputation with our customers; often I've felt the way we sell and bundle our products undermines our customer experience. Some teams do not value or put as much budget into research, or sometimes that research will be introduced too late in the pipeline for any significant design changes to be made before getting rushed into development. The people here are very transactional and often look for their own interests. When I was interviewing here, I emailed a designer on another team to ask about her interview process and her take on the culture- only to get back a reply that I should "consider what I could offer her in return" for her giving this information and that I should "think about what I'm asking for before emailing her" and that she was "tired of getting emails asking for favors without any returns". That should have been a red flag as this was very indicative of the silo culture here- asking for any help from any team that isn't yours will warrant a cold response, if any at all- and often to get any help you need to pull favors. Perhaps it's just the size of the company itself, but to me it's never felt very collaborative. The company is very frugal and when I was in the offer stage, my particular recruiter was very, very pushy about asking for my old salary and as a result, my offered salary was much lower than that of peers in my same role and level, even after negotiating up another 5k. I have some suspicions that there is a fairly large pay gap between women and POC because of the way they recruit. Also, your experience will vary widely depending on which department you are in. If you aren't in the department working on all of the software products, you don't get the same perks: we don't get any catered food, we don't have a winter holiday party, and we generally don't get invited to the celebrations the product departments host.

The true believers are being swallowed up by a crowd of opportunists who are focused only on seeking political favor from senior leadership. Many of these opportunists barely know who their customers are and what they want. A few years ago, Autodesk decided that it couldn't grow and compete by acquiring technology (it long ago gave up trying to innovate organically). Its new strategy, which has been increasingly visible over the past four years, has been to extract more money from customers who can't switch away easily from its products and to reduce costs by systematically cutting "experienced" employees, regardless of performance, and replacing them with interns and new hires. Of course, every company needs to turn over its skill base to stay relevant, but at Autodesk there is a pattern where low performing, highly paid but politically savvy employees are retained while higher performers are let go. What's worse, some of the new hires aren't always top performers (to be fair, some are excellent, but why settle for just some). The environment has become increasingly political, and a company that has always struggled to listen to customers has become practically deaf to them at this point. Oh, and the sabbatical seems like a cool idea, but when you compare it against a standard vacation policy it's not such a great deal.