Pros: High-tech hardware development is pretty awesome. You will learn a lot about making cutting-edge chips and stand in awe of the veterans who make the fabs run. Fellow rank-and-file engineers are generally really helpful, exceptionally intelligent, and friendly. They are great people to make great personal connections with. Rigorous engineering standards, intellectual debates, and data-driven approaches. You will learn what it means to engineer some seriously tight tolerances like never before. You will dream in Design of Experiments, Null Hypothesis Testing, and Response Flow Checklists. Statistical Process Control charts trending out of control will haunt your nightmares (maybe you should go check the charts one more time; that last point was a little suspect). Healthcare and parental leave benefits are still pretty good. PTO is flexible, and group leaders are chill if you need a little extra time. Just make your deliverables and do your job, and it's not a problem. My training was great and extensive. There are lots of opportunities to learn more. There are lots of technical slides, videos, an army of big brains to pick at, and lots of good resources you can draw on. There's never a shortage of nerd fodder to keep chewing on. The worst trainings were the corporate ones, and even those still have some interesting and useful tidbits in them. Base pay is not bad, even for an entry-level engineer who can barely do anything useful. It isn't like a crazy tech salary, but you definitely won't starve! The big bucks start pouring in once you reach the equivalent of an Area Manager. Mine said his base salary is more than twice mine. I imagine it only goes up exponentially from there. Meetings are productive and well-run with clear agendas (though there are a lot of them). The technical leaders who rose up through the ranks are very good (it's the other ones who are the problem...).

Cons: - There's a lot of meetings, even at entry level, and they multiply like rabbits thereafter. You will soon covet those precious little open spaces in your calendar more than Gollum loves the One Ring. - The acronyms. There are so many of them, and puzzling out what they mean is quite a time sink. I've run into important acronyms that no one knows what they originally stood for anymore. - It's corporate, and not in a positive way. Not totally dysfunctional, but it's not really designed to help the average employee nearly as much as it helps accomplish some objective of someone upstairs. - 90% of Intel's problems start from the very top. Upper leadership can't both broadcast a consistent message to the company and deliver on it; at best, you will get one or the other. Many upper leaders seem like they came out of a vending machine from some consultancy. One particularly bad case took his org on a cruise... during austerity... in the middle of a layoff. He's now a CEO somewhere else. The Peter principle must still be in force. - Current CEO's first talk started with him saying he was humble... before launching into a long exposé of all his awesome achievements across a storied career. Take that as you will. - The Intel leadership specialty is in finding scapegoats to launch all-out-attacks-on, the aftermath of which never yields tangible benefits and often negatively affects their employees. Some of my favorite inanities: making huge reorgs only to undo them a year later, too much money spent supporting free coffee, employee sabbatical was too much (~4 weeks after 4 years?), too much on dividends for stock, not enough "execution," too much remote work, meetings having long-winded segments on having too many/too long of meetings (I still can't believe it), meetings are overloaded so not enough is getting done in meetings but we should not have more meetings, we're not engineering-focused enough... the list of half-baked strategies goes on and on. You can rest assured that despite all these changes and slogans and banners, the only thing that will change is your job will be worse than before after whatever solution they think of is implemented without your input. - Corporate mind games and propaganda abound; upper/middle management seems mostly hand-picked for their ability to convey platitudes and tow the party line, rather than their ability to stick it to the man and snuff out corporate insanity when and where it arises. This means if you find yourself in opposition to some policy, you're pretty much on your own. It's mostly innocuous and annoying, but it's genuinely awful when you really need help and the one-size-fits-all solution you keep telling them doesn't work is given to you again. - Multiple layoffs have left skeleton crews in many critical spots and many people are wearing multiple hats, including yours truly. I am at the point of turning away people I badly want to help, but my head will explode if I try to put one more thing in it. - Work-Life Balance on the process line is a mixed bag filled with conflicting messages. Some days are indeed well-balanced with plenty of time to actually think and take breaks, but most of the time, you can forget about lunch or heading home on time, doubly so if you actually want to contribute to the development or help others out. The only resources I've gotten to lighten my load are instructions to stop being nice and helping other people out. That's despite all the high-level slogans that we should help each other out and be proactive. - Bonuses and stock price evaporated like they were hit by Marvin the Martian's ray gun when the business started to struggle. I won't say that's an unexpected or unfair impact, but it's not a positive thing either. - Lately, the atmosphere has been tense and even unfriendly at times. Probably because we're going into another round of layoffs, and leadership's roadmap and rhetoric feels more and more out of touch with the reality in the trenches. - Orgs and jobs tend to be siloed in their areas of expertise, and escaping them even temporarily to do a little learning or to help someone on the outside is way more exhausting than it needs to be. Some silos are defended vehemently for reasons which directly conflict with overarching business goals. - The org-political shin-kicking is nauseating. It's not frequent, but when it happens, there's nothing more depressing than watching smart people who would've finished the job already if they'd just worked together on it. Doubly so if it's your own boss doing it (ask me how I know). - Promotions look like the worst thing that you could wish on someone. If it happens, you will need to drop frivolous commitments like family, friends, or kids. In fact, your main rewards are being forced into the org-political arena, being assigned people management duties, and more advanced technical work, all in addition to the work you were doing before. It's not clear to me that you really get all that much of a pay increase to compensate. You also need to tow the party line or you'll have a miserable time. There’s just no upside to it, unless you really like climbing the corporate ladder, in which case there looks like plenty of opportunities. - This isn't necessarily specific to Intel, but cost of living in many of the areas where you can work near Intel campuses has exploded, but the pay isn't quite high enough to get you much else other than an apartment. If you want a corporate-drone cookie-cutter lifestyle, that's fine, but you're going to be SOL if you want a little more than that.

Pros: A great company to work for.

Cons: Poor outlook over the next few quarters.

Pros: It is a rewarding job.

Cons: Less work-life balance in the job.