AMD

Opportunity to work on some really exciting, cutting-edge technology as well as learn and hone your skills.

Current CEO genuinely cares about the company and is not just there to bide time before deploying the golden parachute.

Current executives are starting to be aware of the problems (outlined in the two sections below) and may be able to turn the company around.

Non-existent raises and bonuses (not existent because of how poorly the company is currently performing).

Huge discrepancy between people when it comes to responsibilities and compensation. You may be working like a dog and be responsible for a number of things, all while getting paid less than a person (same role and title, but different team) who is doing 20% of what you do while getting paid more.

Frustrating lack of technical leadership. Most of the middle management really lacks technical skills, which is unacceptable for an engineering company. (Many ASIC managers are not capable of any technical contribution and some lack understanding of some absolutely fundamental concepts).

As a result, a lot of managers solve their problems by simply throwing more people at the issues. This empire-building attitude creates large teams with a lot of weak engineers instead of lean, agile teams with strong engineers.

During my past years with the company, I have seen far more good people leave than join.

A lot of groups have family (mafia)-like relationships within them. While this may be a good thing because people have a lot of friends at the office, it does not promote a healthy, critical look at the teams (i.e., everyone is family; there are no strong or weak people).

HR heavily influences promotion cycles, which is highly demotivating and leads to a "government job" attitude at the workplace. Why work harder when you'll get your promotion anyways after x-number of years? This, again, does not encourage good people to stay at the company and is not a trait of a high-tech business.

People are far more interested in keeping their job than seeing the company succeed.

AMD is a severely broken company, and drastic changes are needed.

1. Given the current output of chips, AMD is simply too large for what we do.

2. Corporate culture needs to change to address issues outlined above. This change needs to start from the top. Not sure what advice to give to management here, but a cleanup similar to what Keller did with the CPU group needs to happen across the company.

3. AMD is first and foremost an engineering firm. As such, AMD needs to attract and keep strong engineers and get rid of the poor ones, along with unnecessary levels of management. AMD cannot afford to lose strong technical talent. Strong engineers need to be recognized, and the company really needs to invest in attracting senior technical talent.

4. Given publicly released financial results, outlook, and roadmap plans, it does not take a management consultant to see that AMD needs a large cash injection to survive until its money-making products come to market. How to raise that cash is the sixty-four thousand dollar question the executive team needs to answer (sale of assets? downsizing? sale of IP? capital markets?).