Maxis Communications Reviews — 915 Employee Reviews

Reasonably decent pay, ESPP, RSUs ok. Claims they are 'competitive' but lots of internal complaints about how they aren't.

1. It's basically a hardware culture and software is something they've not really prioritized (hence the freaking out about the comments in SemiAnalysis taking them to task for the state of their software stack). This shows in many ways. If you're hoping to do some interesting development than choose your team carefully because a lot of what AMD does is basically take NVIDIA open source code, translate it to HIP, fix all the bugs, make it play nice with their compiler, and then release it. Since you're behind NVIDIA at that point then you have to start the process all over. There's no internal plan or push to get out of that cycle. Hence there's no strategic software plan other than 'copy NVIDIA'. You'll end up working on a lot of skills other than software development. Look at what the team is working on and if it seems like it's an NVIDIA clone operation, consider carefully. This can also lead to versioning conflicts. 2. Because of #1, the leadership up through senior director level is pretty lame. You can ask many times about strategic plans but you'll never get an answer. You can ask 'when do we get to do something creative and visionary?' and you'll get 'we hope to do that some day soon'. 3. Because they're still a hardware company and rabidly protective of anything IP related (fair for a h/w company), even if you're working on open source software, they'll still lock down everything behind firewalls and such making setting up a lot of stuff...challenging...especially when they keep changing things. 4. Because they haven't quite grasped that they need to be a software company, they're still grappling with the need to have resources available to developers for testing, CD/CI, etc. They're getting somewhat better but they're still way behind the curve of where they need to get the most productivity out of their engineers. 5. It's literally impossible for you to get 100% of your specified bonus even if you hit 100% of your metrics and the company does as well. You'll probably end up getting 70-75% at best. 6. Trying to move laterally in the company is nearly impossible. You can apply internally for a job, which should be easy, and it will likely sit there for six months or more and nothing will happen unless you start bothering people.