Pros: They will take you right out of college (talent development). On-site services, cafeterias, and especially gyms are great. Ronler Acres is a beautiful campus. Parental leave is not bad considering they're an American company.

Cons: Work-life balance is up and down. In fab modules, your off-call weekends are pretty secure, but be prepared for long days if one of your tools goes down. When it's your weekend on-call, don't make any big plans and be prepared to go in if necessary. There are also a lot of midweek off-shift calls for tool owners. Layer owners (who also own tools) get hit even harder. The quality of your group leader is extremely correlated to your quality of life. Get a crappy one, and it sucks. They can also be penny-wise and dollar-foolish. For example, in my case, they sent us to vendor training out of state. Instead of sending a brand-new engineer to the prerequisite course, they skip you through to 'advanced' and then shorten that course by three days in order to save more money. I had been in the company for nearly a year, so I caught on to the material pretty quickly, but I knew of a newly promoted ET who attended and didn't understand anything because he'd had less than a month in the position. So, they will spend around $1500 just to get you out there for an interview, but then take that approach to training.

Pros: Great compensation and benefits. Paternity leave is amazing and encouraged. In-house training is good. Some managers really care about employees.

Cons: Work-life balance is terrible: You are expected to respond to issues 24/7 within 30 minutes and be able to be onsite within 2 hours. The fab is chronically understaffed for engineers because management does not consider on-call time as work time. Job stability is non-existent: During the recent round of layoffs, everyone in my organization that had been working longer than 3 years was fired. Many people leave due to burnout. Career growth is working for the right manager at the right time: Success at Intel trickles down. If a manager is successful and promoted, those under them also get promoted, regardless of whether there are more qualified or senior people in other organizations. Fear of failure holds technology development hostage: At every level, it is made clear that you will be fired for any mistakes. This means any fixes you come up with to make the job easier get caught in the limbo of, 'Is it important enough to pursue?' The result is, as an engineer, you are forced to continuously put out fires rather than actually solve issues.

Pros: Salary and benefits are the main draw.

Cons: Management treats engineers and technicians as expendable indentured servants. Nonexistent work-life balance.