Acquired start-up; bumpy ride but moving in the right direction
Pros
- Plenty of problems to solve, hence plenty of opportunities for motivated engineers - Work/life balance engineers are not expected to work crazy hours (It's down to personal choice) - Managers are likely to take a chance on you if you want to change lanes career-wise - There is some budget for learning and development (but you have to ask for things -- don't expect to be spoonfed or you'll stagnate) - Being part of a corporation means there are opportunities to move jobs internally as well as a ladder to climb if that's your thing - A mixture of start-up-like culture and the resources and long-term strategy of a corporation (though the exact mix depends on the team you're in)
Cons
- Jack of all trades: the business has fingers in many pies, including AI, IoT, CGI, Education and Training, and Video Streaming/Management. Even after being acquired by a much larger organisation, it's hard for a business unit of this size to manage the complexity they entail let alone excel at every one of these things . - Product development has been known to encourage "code monkey"/"feature factory" engineering culture where JIRA tickets are turned over and features shipped without much thought about the value of the features or the long-term maintainability of production systems as a whole. Busy application developers and more features don't always equate to "more value" - Given the frequency of restructuring in Medtronic, some doubt hangs over the future of projects and teams - Only expect greenfield work if you're lucky/politically savvy. There is a lot of legacy code and technical debt. Touch surgery aggressively pivoted and the remnants of old products still live on in codebases
