Intel

All of this depends heavily on your immediate manager, their manager, your group, and the higher business group you're in. If you have a good manager (which everyone will tell you is rare), then it can be an awesome place to work. If you have an okay manager (pretty likely), then the other benefits and pros can get you by and make you happy.

• They pay about 10-20% more than other employers, in addition to getting 3 additional bonuses a year.
• If your manager supports it and your tasks allow it, you can get 1-3 work from home (WFH) days. They're also pretty flexible about hours (I know quite a few people don't get into the office until 10 am).
• Casual: jeans, t-shirt, and running shoes is the standard.
• High-level managers give quarterly business and division update meetings so everyone gets insight into how their job fits into the big picture and has an understanding of the markets and initiatives.
• Unique/Good benefits:
  • Stock Purchase Plan lets you put up to 2-5% of your paycheck into an account that buys you Intel stock, discounted at 15% once every 6 months.
  • The 3 weeks (4 weeks if you've worked there for 10+ years) of vacation time is a "recommendation," not a hard and fast limit. Depending on your manager, you may be able to take a few extra days.
  • Get (pretty significant) corporate discounts on hardware and software.
  • Everyone gets a Passport card (Vault level... not that great of a selection, but still a benefit).
  • Has its own airline between sites (that's just kinda fun).
  • Free financial counseling and good site-by-site activities, initiatives, etc.
• Will pay for a significant part of your next degree (A friend of mine got a master's and Ph.D. for free via Intel), with a lot of available internal training (depending on what you're looking for).
• Some groups will try to keep you from moving on and growing, but the majority of Intel is very big on helping you get new opportunities.
• You can go talk to anyone, no matter what their level is, at any time ("Open Door Policy"). In addition, people you've never met before are very willing to meet up to tell you about what they do and mentor you (that's unique, I think, and very awesome).

Too darn big to know it's rear from its elbow - for some people, this is exciting; for others, it's just frustrating. The corporate values are awesome, but the company is just so big that it's impossible for any accountability. This means there are some really bad engineers/managers that just hide out in the company, or managers that run their groups like weird little "fiefdoms" (another employee's word) with their own values (or lack thereof) and policies.

Here's another policy that blows: you find a job on the internal jobs website and apply for it, your manager gets an email immediately informing them that you are job shopping.

A lot of the newer leadership has a business rather than an engineering background, but the ones that do have the technical background are AWESOME.

Casual: jeans, t-shirt, and running shoes is the standard - this was on the pro's list too. It is awesome most of the time, but for those of you that like dressing up for work or feel more professional/productive when you wear slacks or business casual, prepare to feel very slouchy all the time. A lot of times dressing nice will result in everyone asking you if you have an interview today.

Lack of communication across different groups.

Performance Reviews (called "Focal") can be really unfair. Every employee in a group is compared by grade-level then rewarded (or punished) on a bell curve. If your whole group is solid, someone still has to get the bad grade. The bad grade makes for extra work and sometimes ties you down to your group longer.

Hire & Fire tendencies. Intel goes through swings where they need hardware engineers or they'll just die, so they hire a ton. Then they realize a year later that they don't need half those people anymore. Then they'll go on a software engineer hiring binge, then lay them all off again when they realize they hired too many. Some business groups are better at this, and Intel as a whole is getting better, but it still happens sometimes.

Intel's values are all listed on the back of employee badges. One of these is "properly staff and fund projects" - not a chance on that one. Most of the groups I know of are understaffed, under a serious time crunch all the time, and are constantly being evaluated about what they're billing.

I had a 1:1 with a pretty senior person last week. He said, "this company's a bunch of ***holes, you have to have a pretty thick skin to survive here." I've found that to be true some of the time. But there are also some genuinely awesome folks.

In some groups, there is some heavily guarded tribal knowledge, with poor documentation and no training for new employees.

Heads up: Your low-level managers are holding on to some truly horrible workers out of fear that if they let a bad person go, higher-ups will not let them hire another person to fill the void.

There needs to be a better process or filtering system that will prevent bad eggs from getting in.

Focal. Need I really say more? Grading someone on a bell curve means they'll get decimated in focal if the entire group is really good. It's just not a good way to get them motivated.

Hire more new, younger people. Or at least make sure that those dinosaur groups get some turnover.