Overall decent company and benefits, some areas need improvements
Pros
Decent company and decent benefits. Good mentoring from the experienced, but rapidly shrinking experienced workforce. Most managers are understanding of work life balance. Good profit sharing maxing out at 20% for the last few years. Discounted employee stock options with 15% discount. 4% 401k company match. Best chance for promotion is in managerial ladder. Big company with many groups makes it easy to move around while maintaining benefits, learning different roles and functions, and obtaining experience. Each group can have very different work environment and culture. Work tends to be highly involved with local offices and customers in China, India, and Europe. Good set of company values. Large field group with prescence in many countries. Lately taking some efforts to improve diversity in upper management and technical ladder. Some managers are very good and do not micromanage their direct reports.
Cons
Some really awful managers that somehow maintain their position through the years. Little diversity in technical ladder with big emphasis on design engineers. Hard to get promoted in the technical ladder. Extreme cost cutting on employee computers, software, and IT departments, while company pays for a lot of customer visits and travel. High push for security and locking down computer resources that gets in the way of doing your job. Very old lab equipment with very long process for any capital expenses. Mostly hiring new college graduates. Most innovation is just incremental, not given much latitude to experiment. Due to large number of new college graduates, experienced workers spend a lot of time training new employees. Most new college graduates do not stay more than 5 years, so experienced engineers are constantly training people. Prepare for many early morning and late evening meetings due to working with co-workers in China and India. Centralized labs facilities are very noisy, crowded benches, small or no monitors, and difficult to concentrate. Some open office areas deter collaboration rather than foster it due to distracting noise. Management highly focused on short term gains rather than more involved and well thought long term plans. For example, big push to sell what we have and have very short design cycles were features are removed, instead of trying to understand why a device does not sell and spend the time to make a better device. Most employee career focus is just for new college graduates, so experienced workers tend to stall and leave the company. Your salary growth is highly dependent on your initial hiring salary. Hard to catch up if you fail to negotiate a good salary or we’re hired close to a recession. You might find yourself a few years down the road earning less than a new college graduate a few years down the road. Texas locations suffer from personnel that have highly partisan views that does not favor science and regard for facts. Little diversity at upper management that has seen some advances in the last few years. Some filed personnel are not very technical and act as salesmen.