Applied Materials reviews

Long work hours, no personal life; 10 hours a day is normal and you need to reply emails and text at night. 4 hours meeting everyday force you to work in the late evening. Low morale across engineers since something is wrong with the culture. Managers keep pushing without reasonable deadline. Reward is really low for the high intensity work; pay is low in bay area, and the stuff learned from this company is not that useful for other industries. In addition, managers always ask engineers to think but there is no autonomy and no time to think through problems. Even if you think, no one will care what you think. So many directors and managers pulled you to different directions, sometimes they have no idea what they are doing.

I recently left a similar job at Infineon due to a planned fab closure at my site, excited to come back and work for AMAT after being laid off 15 years ago when the economy tanked in 2002....I was expecting the same family oriented, helpful, intelligent coworkers with a friendly atmosphere that promoted growth of an employee and career and be able to have a decent family life. Company cars, lots of benefits and bonuses all gone. Stepped into a sweatshop atmosphere with a group of hungry wolves that would eat their own if the opportunity allowed it. Applied is no longer the elite and upper crust of technology and work place, it has fallen from grace and seems to be content skidding along the floors of its customers fabs, making the rent and that's about where it stops. Very displeased almost heartbroken to see what has happened to such a one time technical giant and prestigious company years ago. It meant everything to work for Applied before 2002-I am almost embarrassed when I think back in comparison to memories of how it was before -now they have small minded, former car sales men that can't use a screwdriver supervising the field technicians which are mostly non-technical teenagers out of high school that are trained like zoo animals to perform repetitive maintenance tasks; instead of well trained equipment engineers and technicians that performed all field maintenance for the company when it was on top of the capital equipment supplier food chain before 2002. Putting my time in to avoid paying the relo bonus then poof! No one in their right mind would get on this rampant treadmill when you can get a comfortable leather seat in your own office elsewhere.