An outstanding learning opportunity an unconstrained environment - Test/Software Engineer Prism Microwave Employee Review

Prism Microwave took a chance on me despite having an unorthodox educational background and little professional experience as a software engineer. Once hired, they provided me a ton of opportunity for personal growth, learning new programming technologies, and general freedom. They were awesome - they let me kind of do what I want technologically, as long as I showed up and made progress on the software I was responsible for building. They also provided great mentorship, including Darren Cutting and Wesley Sarratt, from whom I learned a ton about RF and software engineering. It was a very neat place to work - I built software drivers for testing equipment, programmed temperature chambers and network analyzers, and learned how to build RF matrices. I haven't had as much fun at a job since! Unfortunately, I didn't quite appreciate the freedom and how cool my upstream were until I got into "the real world" and learned how suffocating management and corporate environments can be. I wish I had had a better attitude... but hey, live and learn. One thing I won't ever forget: how nice my co-workers were there and how important the "community" was to them. We frequently went out for extended lunches (along with our managers) and got together outside of work.

It was a small company that had little oversight and required individuals to be self starters. Not for everyone.

Once you've gained the trust of management you have the freedom to design how you want to design. This means you have to be a self-motivated, hard worker. If you've shown you can do a good job and worked long hours during a very busy time, management has absolutely no problem giving you an extra day off. I've worked long hours before and put in my vacation requests only to see my supervisor not even hand it in so they don't go on my record. When the company is doing well I've gotten very lucrative bonuses, and when the company is struggling they still gave what they could. In the 6 years I have been here I've moved up the ladder consistently. As a young engineer the senior engineers are very knowledgeable and have no qualms trying to teach you everything they know. It is a very friendly work environment and consider most coworkers as part of my family.

People that need to have their hand held at all times will not do well here. Management doesn't try to tell you how to design and you shouldn't be telling them how to manage. It is a small business so sometimes you may have to help out production or with another project that isn't yours, but management always notices this and you will be compensated.