What is the hiring process like at Arm?

If you are good at talking and can sell yourself well during the hiring process, you can land a good position and earn a decent salary just by talking rather than doing real work. Furthermore, you WFH 3days a week, no one knows you are really working or not.

Management is disorganized, with too many people talking and too few actually doing the work. If you negotiate too low when you join, it will take a long time to get a promotion or a raise.

* Good pay. * Decent culture on paper, but it doesn't always filter down to individual teams.

* Meaningless targets and performance reviews – These can quickly become a nightmare, especially under a tone-deaf manager. * Hard to make a real impact – Despite the enthusiastic talk about innovation and change, actually driving meaningful improvements is incredibly difficult. * Poor people management – There's little to no proper selection process for managers, and the heavy-handed hierarchy only makes things worse.

small team, the simple process so you don't need to spend too much time in constant coordination and sync-up that you have to do in the big high-tech so you can have a quicker decision-making process.

most of the time you can only count on yourself to get the job done so it's not good for junior people who need a lot of help from others

Arm is somewhat of a baffling company. On the one hand, it is challenging and fulfilling work. Engineers (even in early careers) work on exciting new technologies, and challenging problems. In many other companies this might lead to burn-out. But I find Arm genuinely caring. From a line manager level, I'm supported. Even as a very junior employee I'm trusted to take care of my own time, book my own leave without approval. From an organisational level, I feel able to reach out to anyone in the organisation for help, advice or feedback. Including VPs, those of whom I've met are very kind, always open to chat and surprisingly down to earth for a large company. On the note of Arm empowering employees, I'm empowered even as a junior engineer to give my ideas a go. My opinions are valued and asked for, by the early careers team and by engineering teams. I've been allowed to take 6-month periods to work on projects of my own devising, which align with arm initiatives. We're also given budget for relevant books, access to proper courses, online courses or learning time. Outside of work, there are also social committees which are funded, both at department levels, team levels and for each section of early careers. These organised events help people to make both professional connections, and also out of work friends. And gives those running them the opportunity to pick up new soft skills. From a executive level, two things I think personify how Arm is run. In the last year, while many tech companies decided immediately to scrap their diversity programmes, Arm redoubled it's efforts with the executive team reassuring us they would not be following the unfortunate trend. The other instance was humility and accepting criticism, the IT team announced their intentions to switch the default communications platform, and after some long and open discussions eventually they announced they were rolling back the decision because as engineers had brought up, despite the cost savings, it would have made engineers unhappy. So, all that to say, I really like Arm! There's a reason most of our interns return as graduates!

Talent acquisition is still very slow, inconsistent and obstructive to hiring. And while well intentioned, Arm's new 'core values' (all 10 of them) are both too many for any one person to remember (do great things anybody?) and if anyone had asked a single engineer about the connotations of '10x' they would have said what a bad idea it was to call them that.

I have found Arm incredibly supporting for me personally as well as working a line-manager. Arm supports people in different life phasis and situations. The colleagues are talented - many of them world leading experts - and helpful. Arm offers as much challenge as you are willing to take on, and there is always opportunities to learn. I find Arm also a very responsible company, supporting local and global communities as well as putting effort in reducing its carbon footprint.

There's always room for improvement, in any company. I know that hiring processes have sometimes failed due to communication challenges or tool issues so that candidates have not received timely updates. Some of the cross-group processes don't work as well they should.

There are good people and strong engineers here. Some teams still have real talent and professionalism. Unfortunately, they are working in spite of the culture, not because of it.

Arm, especially Seattle, feels like a company that is actively rotting from the inside. What should have been an opportunity to build a strong office instead looks like a clique-driven expansion dominated by people pulled from the same Amazon circles, bringing the same politics, toxicity, and ego with them. Instead of building a healthy culture, they seem to be rebuilding the worst kind of corporate environment: closed networks, favoritism, status games, and leadership by intimidation rather than competence. When it starts to look like every new hire is coming from the same division of Amazon, that is not a coincidence anymore. That is a serious hiring and culture problem that nobody seems willing to address. Everyone can see what is happening, but very few people are willing to say it out loud. At least here, it can be said plainly: when a company keeps importing the same people from the same toxic pipeline, it should not be surprised when the same toxic culture takes over. The culture is miserable. There is very little trust, very little real collaboration, and almost no sense that good work is what matters. People who want to improve things are blocked, worn down, or treated like a problem. Politics and alliances seem to matter more than engineering judgment, integrity, or actual results. It feels less like a serious technology company and more like a collection of inflated egos protecting themselves. Leadership is one of the biggest reasons this place feels so dysfunctional. There are senior leaders and VPs who have no business being in those roles. Some project no technical credibility whatsoever, yet still make decisions that affect teams, strategy, and careers. Watching people with weak understanding and poor judgment run technical organizations is both embarrassing and destructive. The higher up you look, the harder it is to understand why some of these people are in charge at all. There is also a deeper identity problem across the company. Arm no longer feels aligned, confident, or well-led. There is visible tension between different parts of the organization, mixed signals about priorities, and no clear sense of vision. Instead of acting like one company with a coherent direction, it often feels like disconnected groups with competing agendas and weak coordination. Benefits are unimpressive, morale is poor, and the overall culture is corrosive. For a company that should be built on technical excellence, too much of the environment is defined by shallow leadership, internal politics, clique hiring, and people who seem far more interested in power than in building anything worthwhile. Life is too short to work in a place like this. There are difficult companies, and then there are companies where the dysfunction feels baked into leadership itself. This feels like the latter.

Hybrid great individuals to work alongside. Some red tape/politics from senior mgt. that have limited or experience in a varied industry experience.

The recruitment/HR team are contracdiciting as applied several times for the same role and finally got it when they could have had it initially rather than the original hire. Hybrid can be strict or non-existent for a technology organisation.

The pay for hours worked is quite good

Complete mess internally. Questionable hiring practices from mandated DEI quotas HR can sometimes hire someone into your team without you knowing, people hiring personal friends, spouses, family members has put the company into a toxic situation. People with skills and knowledge are harder to come by each year, seriously following a similar path to Intel. These people are in it for the long haul and always paranoid and defensive and trying to claim success but never put themselves out in front and take the risks. Most won't get an opportunity like this again to squander and many know the layoff is coming sooner or later. A lot have made it to positions line managing technical staff and the hiring bar drops as they don't want to be at risk of being discovered as useless. Company is overvalued so reward will heavily reduce in the future. Right now it's the honeymoon phase.

The pay for hours worked is quite good

Complete mess internally. Questionable hiring practices from mandated DEI quotas HR can sometimes hire someone into your team without you knowing, people hiring personal friends, spouses, family members has put the company into a toxic situation. People with skills and knowledge are harder to come by each year, seriously following a similar path to Intel. These people are in it for the long haul and always paranoid and defensive and trying to claim success but never put themselves out in front and take the risks. Most won't get an opportunity like this again to squander and many know the layoff is coming sooner or later. A lot have made it to positions line managing technical staff and the hiring bar drops as they don't want to be at risk of being discovered as useless. Company is overvalued so reward will heavily reduce in the future. Right now it's the honeymoon phase.