PTC Software Developer reviews

*First a disclaimer - what I'm about to say is only relevant for the site in Israel, I have no knowledge whatsoever of PTC worldwide sites and their products.* If you have other options I would recommend to stay FAR AWAY from this place, especially if you are a passionate, eager to learn and excited about software engineering, as you will find your motivation, passion and excitement slowly decreasing in this place to a point where you wake up depressed. For me, in my case I had several options and offers before accepting theirs, they talk very big during the interview and in the final phase they let you have only 24 hours to review only a 1 page document describing the most basic stuff regarding the employment, rushing you to make a decision of accepting the offer with no time to process or actually ask relevant questions about the contract or the employment, or gather enough relevant information to make an informed decision. In the end, regretfully, I made the mistake of accepting their offer and worked there for about a year. I'll break down my experience in this place to several main points : First and foremost, Technology Stack - well, if I would have to describe PTC in one single word it would be "OUTDATED". Their technology stack is ANCIENT. You will be working with stuff that was relevant maybe 25 years ago, and with the excuse of 'having to maintain the legacy core of the product' (which is generally OK if your product was written in the last decade or so, not if your product was written more than 25 years ago), they keep on working with the oldest and most ancient tools and frameworks, only trying to find different and more comfortable ways to use those instead of actually modernize their tools and systems. You would never imagine that a company in the year of 2024 is working with such ancient and outdated tools, making their products very limited in terms of progress. Most of the legacy core code of their products was written 20+ years ago and with no actual proper documentation of the code, APIs and tools (which are all internal to PTC btw) you will have a very slow learning curve. As a result, the code and products are very hard to maintain. In addition, since the tools in usage are more than 20 years old and are internal to PTC there is no knowledge on those whatsoever, you will have a very hard time looking for solutions or proper guidance online, making the seniors on your team the only resource to rely on when working. As most of the teams composed of junior engineers, and seniors lacking the time or ability to provide a proper support, you get stuck a lot (way more than the average to my opinion) and get demotivated and frustrated. There is not even a basic documentation or explanation on their technologies, tools and frameworks (which again are all internals and super outdated), and if you're very lucky you get a 5-10 min video taken somewhere between 2000-2008 (you can literally see windows XP was still a banger during the time those videos were taken) after asking half of the company for guidance. To conclude - don't be expecting to work with relevant and new technologies, on the contrary - you will work on some non-relevant highly ancient tools that no one else other than PTC use, and they are all made very specifically to align with PTC products and you will not gain much from working with such technologies and tools (git? you make them laugh). In addition to that, you will have to integrate your code with some 20+ years old hard-to-maintain and hard-to-understand legacy code, adding that to the old tools you will be working with, it is going to take you 5 times more than necessary to implement new stuff and making things work PROPERLY and in the right way instead of just covering tracks and 'put out fires'. On top of it all - the majority of tasks given are described in such a bad manner and are very not clear and hard to understand, and in combination with everything else you end up wasting too much time investigating and understanding the task that in the end you might even get scolded for 'taking too much time' for getting things done which is ridiculous since everything takes way more time than it has to because of all of the above reasons. In addition to that, working remotely from home requires connecting to their systems and the connection is usually very slow and not stable, making it difficult to make proper progress when working from home. To conclude this part - most of the work is super boring, working on a super-specific niche, and working too much time with such tools and technologies might actually harm your future hireability. Compensation - the compensation is pretty lame. The salary is average at best. Stock options and holiday gifts are so poor and not up to industry standards. No fundays or perks, no free food or drinks like in most tech companies (which is understandable because of the hybrid work model but still worth mentioning it). There are "happy hours" twice a week but it usually has very poor and limited options to offer and in general the company is very cheap in compensation. The equipment you get is pretty outdated and lame (AND SUPER HEAVY) and you get nothing more than the basic stuff (computer, bag and some headphones if you're very lucky). This makes you feel very undervalued and it highly affects your moral and motivation to work. They insist on supplying only the basic stuff and you can't ask for extra gear. Culture and general atmosphere - there is basically no culture and the general atmosphere is terrible. I don't know how to describe it but most of the people working there seem like they are dead from the inside, like the fire inside of them was extinguished. There is a very depressing atmosphere in this place. Most of the young ones leave after no more than a year or two in the company and most of the higher ups are veterans with over 20 years of working in this company, making the general atmosphere kind of old and depressing. Working from the office is not a pleasant experience as most of the office is empty, quiet and hollow and it is just depressing to be there. Since there are almost no perks in this place you end up not wanting to show up, only for meet ups with your friends from the team and nothing more. In general - unless you have no other options left, I wouldn't recommend working in this place. It made me depressed, worn and most of the time in there I was just unhappy and felt undervalued.

Bad food Some managers not good