Intel

Intel has good benefits, with 3 weeks of vacation per year to start and separate sick pay. Since 2020, they offer a 401K plan as good as any out there, with in-plan Roth conversion available and decent matching.

They also have a 100% matching program for charitable donations.

As a large company, you won't be running out of licenses for industry-standard tools, and the vendor support staff will return your emails and calls.

After you've been in your position a year, you can transfer internally. A few people do take advantage of this to get exposure to different areas of engineering or roles.

As such a large company, any person's experience is going to reflect the specific division and group they end up in. So I can only comment from what I saw.

Pay is a bit low compared to peers. Younger engineers leaving after a few years at Intel get big raises, but that's always been true in engineering. Once you join just about any employer out of college, you only get a few percent a year raises, and it's up to you to get a big jump by leaving after no more than 5 years at that first job (or at least get offers and see if your current employer will match, knowing you have to leave if they don't match).

Intel uses a mix of industry-standard tools and in-house ones. The staff is made up of people who have only been there a few years and lifers who joined out of college and have 20+ years at Intel. This has three consequences.

First, using the in-house tools depends on tribal knowledge. To the extent documentation exists, it will be filled with jargon such as project names and references to previous tools this one replaced. If you don't know what these were (and as a new hire you won't), then much of the documentation is useless.

Second, change is hard because the people making decisions are often those with long tenure. They justify things with "we've always done it this way" because they are comfortable with the convoluted steps needed to configure and run the in-house tools and flows.

Third, some (if not most, depending on job assignment) of the skills younger engineers learn at Intel have little to no value to employers not named Intel. There are people with 5+ years of experience that have the same value to any other employer as a college grad, so they face a challenge if they want to look elsewhere.

Intel has literally thousands of engineering positions, and a person taking ownership of their career can build a wonderful resume that would make them an attractive candidate elsewhere in case there is a layoff or they decide to leave. Relatively few people do this, however. A key lesson to understand at any large company is the only person looking out for your interests is you. This is especially relevant if all you're doing is running in-house tools and flows.

A surprising lesson is how much personal connections matter to getting your job done at Intel. Intel works on large chips, and any person doing actual engineering work (as opposed to management) only is working on a small slice of the chip, usually just a few steps of the overall effort to design and integrate one of the many modules into the chip. You may be running timing, or verification, or placement, etc. So you'll need to work with other engineers to get the module in, especially when you have problems due to their work or vice-versa.

My advice here is how critical it is to build a reputation of doing everything you can to help out when someone has a problem that may be from work you own. Eventually, the tables will turn, and you'll need help from others. They'll remember whether you helped them and their teammates or just tried to pass the buck when they needed you.