Intel

Strong earnings in microchips and memory.

Strong benefits package.

Gatherings every month to get office workers together.

Intel does engineering at the pace of a snail. Their "agile" teams are slower than your average waterfall team. The culture is driven by pointless and generic Power Point slides.

This is not a joke. Even the developers and engineers are writing Power Point slides.

There is no ownership in the company. Everyone blames other people and teams for problems, and no one ever says, "I own this problem. I will solve it," which leads to nothing getting done.

For example, in the whole time I was there, they never fixed the issue of getting Macs onto their network. You can "connect," but then you can't get to critical resources like the Internet. Or, if you can get to the Internet, then you can't connect to company web pages that are optimized for IE 7. That's not a joke either.

It's not a complaint because as an Intel employee, you get used to things being slow and not working right. I just offer it as a tangible example.

If you have ANY talent at all, stay away from this company. If you are marginal in talent, then jump right in.

By the way, enjoy the on-boarding process. It is from 1990 and drives everyone nuts, but no one ever fixes it. Again, no ownership here.

Your culture nurtures conservative decisions and slow-to-market processes. You can't and won't be able to compete unless you change your culture. Your poor hires then hire other people who are equally poor. That's why no past employees from known growth companies work there. You can feel the mediocrity from the top down. Since no one there dives deep, all the business units can get away with getting nothing done and hide behind PowerPoint slides.