Intel

A relatively stable workplace. Intel also provides a pretty good work-life balance and allows working from home and taking your vacation when you wish.

Career-wise, you can always take a new direction inside the company and start with a brand new job without actually starting over.

People are usually very nice and keen to help each other; it is not a very competitive place, in a good way mostly. Additionally, management is accessible – you can talk to anyone.

Intel has recently made its move towards servers and IoT, and also released many of its employees. I believe that this was a smart move.

The work itself felt very disconnected from the end-product, and therefore, motivation was low. Creativity is not encouraged; you do your job, you finish it, and you go home. The job got quite boring after a while.

Professionally, it feels like a mess. Software tools are being used while nobody knows where they came from; it is all patched up, and progress is hard to be made. Workflows are usually very unstable.

Culture-wise, Intel is a huge corporate which is trying to meet the lowest common denominator. In such a workplace, that would be a too common and boring denominator. The atmosphere at the office is not much fun.

Intel is quite known to be a startup killer. They acquire a good startup, and then it stops being that good. I believe that good creative people need a creative ecosystem to work in. In some cases, try to break big groups into small startups. Even if they are expensive, they will pay off. Don't enforce corporate methodologies and culture on these particular groups; let them work the way they do.