Revenue-wise, the EDA industry pretty much stopped growing years ago, and I doubt it will grow much faster than its current modest growth. There will always be new technical challenges, but the market simply stopped growing. The biggest customers now simply expect more and better for the same price. This simple fact explains pretty much everything: Salaries don't grow as fast as in other software companies; Promotions get very selective early on. Recognition is given to those that work on objectives that are pushed down the management chain, instead of experimental ideas coming from fresh blood. Bad managers are tolerated. Some groups are organized as a couple of "brains" in unattainable positions doing all the interesting work, and many "hands" doing what feels like menial tuning in comparison. Every time the chip industry sneezes, EDA gets the cold. The once generous vacation policy got cannibalized by forced shut-downs. No perks worth mentioning. Don't count on the stock benefits paying your mortgage down payment. The software engineering practices in many groups will feel outdated to new grads, and there's no enthusiasm to pay the cost of modernizing the practices and re-training the senior engineers. You'd expect that complex chip design tools would be running on distributed systems by now, yet, most of them are still single-machine tools, and I suspect, it's because the industry doesn't afford the investment to redesign them. Specializing in EDA may feel like wasting your brain power and youthful energy when companies in less technically challenging industries are growing rapidly while EDA is still a 5 billion dollar industry.
As a former employee, I actually feel privileged for having worked at Synopsys, overall the pros outweighed the cons, but unfortunately I felt that the industry had gone stagnant and started aging. Because of this, I cannot recommend EDA as a technical area to young software engineers, unless something radical happens that revives the industry's revenues.
