Are you able/allowed to provide more details?
Wolfram becomes audibly irritated at bad ideas, but mostly only when they should have been better, more complete, better explained (in their interest of time, for example) etc.
I think most of those who work with him know that he pursues truth, not what will make people feel good in that moment/meeting.
I’ve worked around people who are the opposite and try to morph reality so that whatever flimsy idea is suggested is somehow considered ‘correct’, and it results in long term frustration and inefficacy.
They also unrelentingly pursue bad ones. 3D fire phone interface, boring company + everything with Twitter, trying to fight cancer with a fruitarian diet ....
One of those things is not like the other lol
The commonality is they all brought $1b+ ideas to market; they didn’t just have good ideas, but did the hard work necessary to execute on them.
Mathematica has been around for over 40 years. It has 1600+ employees. Tell me, how could a private company make payroll for 1600 top earners without hundreds of millions in revenue? They had no outside funding that we know of.
Obviously this company has made $1 billion dollars in its lifetime. Many times over I'd guess.
- Headquartered in Champaign, Illinois (not a bad town, but not sexy)
- As "cool" as their software is, not a lot of people use it. Python is eating their lunch, ESPECIALLY outside of academia. Although, they're losing ground in academia as well
- Stephen Wolfram isn't a charismatic leader who is fun to work for. There's no shortage of stories of him short circuiting in meetings and treating employees disrespectfully.
- They're not doing quite as much cutting edge stuff (that matters, at least) these days. Their AI/ML suite isn't that interesting, numpy/scipy does a lot of numerical stuff better, Matlab does a lot of stuff (like digital signal processing, for example) better. And Python, being free and open source, is a better prototyping language for most stuff. Symbolic computing is probably the one place it is actually a leader in... but for so many applications in the real world (engineering, r&d, real-time algorithms, etc) symbolic computing simply isn't needed.
As you hint at, they can attract some talent because there are opportunities to work on some niche stuff that's hard to work on elsewhere. But that's a minority of roles at the company.
Source: Used to work there.
Sales / potential gross profit per FAANG employee is high.
How do they pay compared to other midwestern employers?
True, but it's always funny when people compare midwestern salaries to FAANG companies, as if the cost of living is like 10x less in the midwest. I don't know the specifics of what wolfram pays, but my gut feeling has always been that it's likely pretty good. A lot of the other random math and tech adjacent companies in the area started by ex-wolfram employees and UIUC grads seem to be doing pretty well.
Their Glassdoor reviews used to be a bit dodgy too, nothing you wouldn't be able to guess after watching 10 minutes of any video of you-know-who though.
They are also just small, only a few hundred people if I remember correctly.
What I really mean is that I don't think they see themselves as an engineering company in the way FAANG do, or an "AI" company, but probably more like a maths/science department at a university.