Broadcom

There are lots of very smart people that work here. The quality of each individual team varies considerably, though.

Some teams are led by excellent managers and full of smart and helpful people; others consist of mediocre employees led by poor managers.

If you interview, definitely complete any due diligence that you can - don't take an offer blindly unless you are exceptionally perceptive of people at first impressions.

I would say that some groups are apolitical, where people are often helpful; others are cutthroat and arguably for no good reason.

There are lots of people that have been here a long time and have no incentive or desire to leave. This means that there is a lot of knowledge sharing, but also fewer opportunities to shift around.

The best thing about working here, at least for me, is that your immediate team tries to bring you up to their skill level and backstabbing isn't something you have to worry about.

Basically, every team has its own character; some great, but some terrible; most are quite technically capable - the shortcomings are elsewhere.

The odds of moving up from a development role into any sort of management are slim. The management structure tries to remain flat. While good for effectiveness and efficiency, it is poor for future opportunities (not that this matters to me or most engineers, but it's something to be aware of). Compensation is mediocre; we had all our options taken away but little else to make up for that shortfall, although my understanding is that this was a widespread occurrence.

Only two weeks of vacation is a much lower number than you'd expect from a tech company. In general, all of the "auxiliary" benefits that you'd expect from tech companies of this size aren't there. There's no amenities to speak of (at my location). What kind of tech company doesn't have any common space whatsoever on a site with 500+ employees? This means no cafeteria, no fitness facilities. The quality of the food that is brought from the San Jose facilities goes from terrible to disgusting; whether or not food even shows up is always inconsistent, and there's no response to feedback regarding how terrible it is. What this translates to is that in a typical day, you show up, you bring your lunch, you do your work, you go home. What kind of company, much less a tech one, doesn't offer commuter checks in 2008? You're in walking distance from Sunnyvale Caltrain, yet this is the only company I am aware of that doesn't do a commuter check system.

Come here to learn a technical field well and learn from smart people. Don't expect more.

Fire everyone on your Facilities team. They've screwed up so many times, and it's truly amazing that one completely internal-facing team can undermine, interfere with, and complicate the efforts of dozens of successful engineering teams. They've succeeded in completely fragmenting the engineering organization due to complete and utter incompetence. If an engineering team executed as poorly as the facilities team does, they would be cut with nary a snap of the fingers. What's going on here? Why are they permitted to screw up time and time again and make it hard for our internal groups to function?

Don't even get me started on the quality of the food service that is brought to this location. Why is there no response to feedback? Why can they never project even simple things like headcount correctly?

Quality of life matters. Not all of us are the most productive when we sit at a cube for ten hours a day with nothing else to do. Take a lesson from just about every other Bay Area company. What kind of tech company doesn't even have a cafeteria or fitness facilities on a site with 500+ people?