Hi there, Autodesk engineer here. I haven't been here too long, but it's decisions like these which make me ashamed to be associated with this company. I work on a different product, but it feels incredibly odd sometimes to see these kinds of articles, because the engineers I work with are really focused on the end user experience, at least on my team. That being said, I've seen a lot of issues here.

First off, our sales force is ridiculously massive. We have 8,000 full time sales people (although they get a fancy title like, solutions expert). In comparison, the number of engineers and UX folks who work on Revit is under 200. We're completely sales-first.

Second off, the amount of mid-level managers who have no other dependents besides a manager is astounding. My boss's boss has no other dependents than my boss, and it's the same thing with my boss's boss's boss. Have absolutely no clue what value they add to the org. There's so much political infighting that makes it incredibly hard to get anything accomplished, we have certain teams that refuse to communicate with another team and they literally just go two separate paths instead of following a unified vision.

Third, our top level VP's / executive suite have never used Autodesk products before. I'm not kidding about this. I'm 100% that our new CTO, Raji Arasu, has never used any Autodesk product before, based on meetings we've had. Given her background from Intuit, this isn't a huge surprise, but could you imagine if the CTO at Tesla had never driven a Tesla before?

I'm not sure how we've gotten to this point. The CEO is literally a rocket scientist from JPL, I can't figure out why he's running the company into this direction of extreme greed. Autodesk is a complete monopoly, and many of the people inside this org are extremely comfortable with the moat that Autodesk has built. I'm not.