Intel

Very good base compensation. Very good basic benefit package. Excellent bonus program. Company legitimately tries to be ethical. Pockets of true engineering brilliance and passion. There are true technical rock stars here - engineers who have shaped entire industries. Deep understanding of hardware design and production. Company understands it needs to diversify for growth, and it is doing all the right things there. Intel values education highly. They will subsidize your education. Exposure to a wide array of interesting technology. Product-focused teams tend to be well-run and well-managed.

Technology-focused teams tend to be poorly managed.

Low stock options/RSUs.

Depressing, grey, "cube farm" mentality. The fix is to push everyone into significantly smaller, but significantly more colorful cubes.

Huge, mega-projects involving hundreds to thousands of developers spanning multiple geographies.

While Intel understands how important software is to their business, there is very little actual understanding of how to develop software.

Director-level management (and up) are, more often than not, either corrupt, self-serving, or incompetent.

Armies of people appear to be frantically busy but are actually developing/doing very little. It is the appearance of progress which is valued.

Like any large organization, there is a rather huge bureaucracy fueling it.

Lots of meetings, lots of anonymous people demanding things from you, and lots of egos telling you how you must do something.

Ship dates are routinely set from above. Engineering estimates are rarely used.

Almost all attempts Intel has made to diversify beyond its core desktop CPU business have failed on a massive scale (e.g., Larrabee). These project failures impact people's lives on a large scale.

Questionable upper management decision-making. Recent acquisitions, such as McAfee, are a case in point.

Matrixed organizations with no one at the helm.

Competitive, not a teamwork-oriented environment. In general, you have to push to get someone to help you.

Time to shake things up and clear out middle and upper management ranks that have dug in.