Pros
This is a company of very bright engineers with millions of ideas all fighting to get their idea to the top of the corporate funding heap. No shortage of innovation here. There is never enough money to buildout every idea and the extended ecosystem required, so at times the end-to-end customer experience suffers.
Benefits, Work/Life Flexibility, Job Rotations, and a business in the middle of transformation (aka job security)
There are too many benefits to list them all. That is why Autodesk is often in the Top 100 Places to Work. Specifically, two six-week sabbaticals and a fully-covered child birth have been much appreciated.
Work/Life flexibility is not be confused with work/life balance. Autodesk allows most employees to work anywhere and anytime. This includes working on weekends, evenings, or while on vacation. In exchange, you can take an afternoon or day off to attend family events, kids sports, etc. If you get your work done, you 'earn' more flexibility.
Job rotations are often a substitution for promotions at Autodesk. Personally, I've gained a wide range of experience by taking advantage of four rotation opportunities over my nine years here. This approach has helped me to build an understanding of the various impacts of change on our customers, partners, and fellow employees when large change management efforts are introduced.
Transformation to newer subscription business models is generating more challenging work than there are employees to support it. This has created a strong sense of job security for those individuals working on the products, projects, and systems that support the new business models.
Cons
Since there is always a huge funnel of ideas needing prioritization of corporate funding, the leadership team often changes it's mind and strategies, based on new information. This occurs on a weekly basis and can create a sense of wasted cycles for those involved in enablement of management strategies. It has also generated less than ideal customer experiences, as portions of the budget were throw-away work which could not be leveraged to support the latest weekly strategy from leadership; thereby leaving fewer funds for finalization of polished customer experience. For a company trying to transform itself, this is too be expected. This review is just setting expectations for those interested in Autodesk; expect weekly change and be comfortable with ambiguity.
We often find teams that do not get funded, off building skunkworks solutions that lack elements of customer experience polish you'd expect from a $2B company.
Promotions are rare at Autodesk. HR tends to recommend against promotions whenever they are raised by managers. It's not always clear to employees what they need to do to receive a promotion here.
