Applied Materials

You are surrounded by people from different walks of life and are always faced with new and unique challenges every day.

Everyone around you has something to teach you, as long as you know your way around.

You will be working at client sites around the world, and you can stay in the industry for the rest of your life if you can go slightly above what is expected of you on a daily basis.

You will also run into "idiots" (90% of these are not Applied Materials employees; these are people you have to work with at client sites), and you will learn how to deal with them.

Depending on which stage you are in the client's business demands and the industry trends, you will have varied amounts of work.

Some days are plain boring with nothing to do, while sometimes you might have to work 16 hours straight.

If you like being pushed to your limits all around, this is a great place to work the same job the rest of your life. But if you want to advance and grow, you have to show you can go above and beyond, both to the customer and to your internal team.

Depending on which client you work at, your demands are varied. Depending on which site you work at, there is varied collaboration. Mostly, you are by yourself. The company does train you, but it is not enough to jump in and troubleshoot.

This is a male-dominant, cutthroat, ruthless, aggressive, and profit-minded vertical within the company. You are the front-line worker of this company in this role. If you do not know how to turn a wrench or are not a technical person, you will be labeled by the customer as an idiot – it doesn't matter if you have three PhDs or climbed Mount Everest. Unless you know how to talk and present yourself in this environment, if you have the right attitude and great soft skills, you can place yourself in the best spot on your team. But be ready for harsh criticism and tough challenges.

It also depends on your manager. Your manager was most likely at your job before they were forced to move up. They're forced because salaried managers make a lot less than hourly workers like you. This means they mostly do not care about you or your shenanigans – they just expect you to go to work and do your job, or else you're easily replaceable.

This job is like going to somebody's house where they think they can do your job better than you, and then constantly being watched by them on how you perform. You make one mistake, and it is hard to come back because the customer does not want you to mess up again, and your internal team will make fun of you for that until you make your next mistake. Once again, this is the characteristic of a male-dominant workplace. You have to learn to stay calm, move on, and take all forms of constant criticism.

Don't even think about bringing large-scale creative new ideas to the table. You will either be shut down, or your manager will steal it to make himself look better, even though he did not contribute. Depending on your manager, he might try to throw you under the bus at times, but if he is nice, he will return the favor. Again, it helps if you know how to talk and network in this environment. Very rarely will your manager address your ideas in a positive manner, but don't worry, it will never be implemented unless it's very trivial, like buying a new kind of wrench.

The company's management structure is not even properly understood by the management. There is so much loss of information from top to bottom, and bottom-to-top feedback is non-existent. Somebody is always trying to cover up their tracks, and this is how stuff does not get done down the line. The mid-management in this vertical is very under-qualified and under-motivated, mostly because they are not well incentivized compared to the people that work for them.

Please hire more qualified external candidates instead of internal referrals. You're better off hiring a qualified external candidate to manage your teams and resources rather than some guy that was referred to you from the cubicle beside you. And pay your managers better than your Customer Engineers. How is your manager going to make strategic business decisions when he feels like a whimp, especially when he can clearly see some people below him making more money than him?