Wolfram Research Reviews

Terrible pay. Not bad for rural Champaign, but definitely not what you are worth. You are going to worry about your job. Everyone from the entry level to the directors can and will get fired for no reason if the CEO is in a bad mood. Projects are always in disarray. Because everybody is scared for their jobs, projects are often times at the whim of the CEO's schizophrenic direction. Get ready to spend a lot of time scurrying to do a useless thing just because the CEO demanded it now and nobody was brave enough to tell him how stupid of an idea it was. Turnover is extremely high. Do not expect to be able to learn from from those more experienced than you, because 95% of people with any meaningful experience has left. People are always looking to somehow pass their work onto you. Because the best way to not get fired is to not do anything, people always try to somehow get you to be responsible for their work. If you are passionate about a project there, get ready to be constantly picking up the slack left by your coworkers. Cross team collaboration doesn't happen. Because helping another team means more work and responsibility, and more work and responsibility means more opportunities to get fired, other teams will almost always do as much as they can to not help your team. This means each time you need something from another team, you will never receive that something in a timely manner if at all. Get ready to go above and beyond your job description, just because another team won't work for you. The company is terribly led. The company is led as if the CEO is a genius and the software it creates is going to change the world any time now. Actually, the CEO is completely out of touch, and the software it creates is objectively bad. The only place the company is headed is down. Do not expect to make any meaningful impact, because the whole company will be unintentionally actively working against you.

I care very, very much about Wolfram Research. I used Mathematica in college quite a bit for research, where I quickly fell in love with its notebook-style interface and powerful symbolic capabilities. I also considered Stephen to be one of my idols for the longest time. However after working for Wolfram full time for a good bit now, I have to say that this company is terribly lost. It seems to be grasping for new directions amid dwindling counts of new users. One of the fundamental pillars to successful computational science is an empirical verification of the algorithms used to arrive to conclusions. Mathematica has shown to be rather reliable in this realm, but more and more people are switching to open sourced alternatives because of the ability to verify any relevant algorithms. Since most of these alternatives are also free, users have an even greater incentive to choose things like Mathics or SageMath. If we want to combat this, we should develop a smaller, open-sourced kernel with only basic Wolfram Language functionality and mathematical tools. If users want more advanced integration features, for example, they could either write it themselves or purchase it as a sort of add-on. Fighting against the FOSS movement is impossible - we must instead adapt to it or use it to our advantage. Furthermore, an open-sourced kernel allows us to tap into the intellectual abilities of the population outside of the employees. I cannot see how this alternative severely hurts or hinders either side. The Wolfram Language cannot be, and never will be, a language that should be used for anything other than symbolic mathematics or rapid prototyping without massive changes to the underlying foundation. Users will always prefer a less-bloaty alternative. The better alternative is to improve the Wolfram Language's integration with other languages and software packages to incentivize the users to integrate it into their "technology stack" where they see fit. The proposed solution above also greatly helps to fix this issue. We absolutely need to slow down our development process. The users will happily wait for a new release if it is done correctly. This is especially the case with the Wolfram Cloud Platform, which should honestly be completely redesigned. I won't go into details here for obvious "trade secret" reasons. I wont comment much on Stephen Wolfram. You only need to read the other reviews on this site to get the idea. Stephen is both the life and death of Wolfram Research. The changes I have suggested above MUST start with him. He must be willing to change and accept ignorance from time to time if anything worthwhile is to get done. I know that this will probably be ignored, but I absolutely love what this company is *supposed* to stand for. I say these things in my attempts help Wolfram Research. For those whom are considering working here, I would keep my distance for now. The company needs to go through a lot of changes first. This company has a lot of brilliant people and fantastic potential, but it is using it in all the wrong ways. As for potential repercussions from writing this review, honestly I can say that I will gladly hand over my job if it means that someone read through everything I've said and actually gave it some thought. I haven't tired too hard to conceal my identity. If worse comes to worse, I will walk away with the mild comfort in knowing that I at least tried.