Intel

• Nice campus
• Nice amenities
• Decent benefits
• Career development (glass-walled though)
• Nice cafeteria with decent food

Intel may be a great place to work if you are a "professional" such as in IT or an engineer, but working as a technician on the fab floor is the worst job you can have at Intel. It's full of frustrations, aggravations, and excuses from management. What techs on the floor have to deal with is emblematic of rot, stagnation, and bureaucracy, which are systemic causes for Intel's loss in dominance over AMD, struggles with 10nm, and failure to meet critical releases like ARC.

Here are overviews of major issues being a tech:

• Intel offers avenues for "career development," but if you are a technician, being a tech really pigeonholes and stifles your career growth potential right out of the box. Being a technician comes with a huge stigma that you will have to fight against, even when you apply for internal career development resources. So, if you are thinking, "I will take a job as an MET to get some benefits and maybe go back to school to aspire and build a great career," well, being an MET puts you at the edge of a career black hole from the start. So, if you are an ambitious and driven person, I do not recommend taking this job as a way of getting "your foot in the door to build a career" for that reason alone, let alone the following below.

• High attrition; they cannot keep good technicians because the fab is a dumpster fire and hard-working, dedicated people get burnt out and leave, especially when you can get some other tech job +$5 to +$10 an hour with far less aggravation. Hiring standards have gotten very low to the point that if you can turn a screwdriver and have a GED, you are a candidate.

• High attrition and mediocre new hires feed into low-quality maintenance, poor documentation, failure to order parts correctly and timely, and work areas left in disarray from previous shifts having no idea how to clean up and order the workspace for the next shift. Engineers are often clueless; those who should know basic thermodynamics have to be trained on how systems work. And how much more money do they make than techs?

• Severe disconnect from management, decision-making, and the technicians. Managers and engineers are constantly changing. Months and years of improvement recommendations from techs go ignored or are kept on an indefinite backburner. Major decisions leave technicians out of the loop that directly affect techs and not engineers (e.g., transitioning to a very heavy forced-air respirator (that everyone hates) without doing any field testing and asking technicians for feedback – nope – some manager or engineer gets an idea and just shoves it on technicians to deal with).

• Maintenance documentation is an absolute nightmare and poorly written. Since METs are held accountable for PMs and are supposed to follow poorly written docs to cover their butts, it will be the METs who get blamed, not the engineers who write the docs. Again, another example of the tech-engineer disconnect, and a lot of it due to bureaucracy.

• Insufficient tools and equipment to perform routine daily tasks. Techs often spend 20 to 30 minutes wandering around the fab to find a specific type of tool and drag it all the way across the fab (which is huge), which presents potential safety hazards, damage to equipment, and increased technician fatigue (lack of tools is such a hypocrisy for a company that is so "safety and ergonomic focused"). Issues like this are years in the making and go unresolved.

• Tools are worn out and have calibration issues. Often, other technicians do not return tools to where they are kept, leading to goose chases.

• Equipment-qualified senior techs are already in short supply and have to train the new hires constantly coming in, which stresses them out since managers are relying on senior techs to get things done and address more advanced maintenance issues.

• Training and certification systems are a dumpster fire as well – again, another disconnect between management, engineers, and technicians. You just have this massive list of things to learn, half of which is irrelevant to what you actually need to know as a technician to work on the tools. There is no "hard tech training" on the actual systems and components you are working on. And there is an ocean of knowledge given to you with vague structure; there is no "study guide" for what is actually on the certification tests.

• Certification tests are given to you at the end of your initial training period instead of incrementally. Half of it is irrelevant, written by people who don't actually work on the tools, asking technical details that are not really emphasized in the training material.

• Already stressed and overworked senior technicians are not given guidance to train new trainees on and simply do not have the time to learn a curriculum to teach – no fault of their own.

• Documentation is scattered all over the place. Often, time links change and are broken or being redesigned.

• Software applications related to METs' tasks are awful. Even if METs know about their existence, it gets lost in the ocean of information.

• 12-hour days – some people love them, some hate them. If you are into health and fitness, 12-hour days will not be conducive to staying on a fitness schedule since 12-hour shift work in the fab drains you.

• If you take this job, you will have to deal with extremely tight walkways, workspaces, and maintenance spaces. You will be constantly walking around, walking over, stepping over everything and anything – and pulling and pushing heavy wheeled objects in this environment is no easy task. There are extremely tight areas while doing part replacement, where you can barely get your fingers in a cavity or gap to install components or fasteners. And then you will have to put on full-faced forced-air respirators on top of that.

• You will not be given a laptop and will have to use the public computers, which are absolutely horrendously slow – like 5 minutes to boot up slow. Outlook doesn't work half the time, so you have to go to office.com. Apps don't work well. The taskbar doesn't work as expected. And people can be extremely loud in these public areas, not respecting those who are actually doing work on the computer – or kicking their feet up watching YouTube videos.

• Culture where mediocrity is the baseline mode of operation.

• Intel is losing focus on what is actually "mission critical" in the fab. For instance, they place "nanny nags" in the dressing room to nag you over small things like badge clips when people, time, money, and resources could be used to get METs the tools, equipment, documentation, and training they need.

• The hourly pay is not really that good for the amount of hassles and aggravations people have to deal with BEFORE even doing highly skilled maintenance on very expensive equipment. As mentioned earlier, you can get other tech jobs at $5 to $10 an hour more with far less aggravation and better working conditions. When you are making $20 to $25 an hour as a tech living in Hillsboro, you are nearly living hand-to-mouth. But the "allure" of working for Intel is why they can get away with paying relatively lower wages and get lower-skilled talent – and hence so many issues in the fab.

• METs are simply not respected, and Intel takes them for granted by not listening to them and giving them the real training and resources they need. Without METs, the fab would not run, and Intel would be out of business.

LISTEN AND REACT TO TECHNICIAN'S NEEDS. STOP MAKING EXCUSES!!!

Base pay at least $35 an hour. (Techs keep your ship afloat - without them, your billion-dollar fabs sink!)

Hire better-qualified candidates.

Get training and certification to what it really needs to be.

Work hand-in-hand with technicians who actually care to make things right.

Fix all of the things that can be fixed, as mentioned in the Cons section.