Intel

Benefits are great. It's cool to be developing next-generation technologies.

Engineers are treated like garbage.

Module engineers do very little development work. Their job is dominated by tedious, repetitive tasks that should have been automated years ago or should be done by technicians.

No work-life balance. Every day I fear getting stuck in the fab and not being able to go home. 12-14 hour days are the norm, and if you're pulled in to work over a holiday, expect to get at most 1 comp day for every 2 days you work.

Don't hire PhDs to do 100 hours of grunt work per week. It's expensive for the company and makes us all miserable.

Hire twice as many bachelors and a small number of PhDs to do development, and you will have a much happier and more productive workforce for the same cost. You also will have a buildup of institutional knowledge that is currently impossible with current turnover.

Firing the previous toxic manager of etch was a good start, but the people who came up under that person have the same attitude and resist improvements.

Don't trap people in toxic modules. If no one wants to stay in a module, then try to fix it instead of making it impossible for them to move within the company.