Intel

Salary and bonuses may be 20-30% lower than comparable companies, but the job stability is unmatched as long as you work on the bread-and-butter microprocessors.

Most of my friends who have left have lost their higher-paying positions at other corporations after a couple of years.

That said, the work is challenging (at least in my area) and rewarding in a karma sort of way, since you realize that many people around the world will use what you work on.

The people are all very bright, and I mostly enjoy working with my team a lot.

Things get done at Intel and done on time (mostly), because when they aren't, the world notices.

Work/life balance depends totally on what group you work in. Some groups are very liberal (Marketing, etc.), but many groups are run by old-timers who absolutely do not believe in ever 'working from home,' and in some cases, even closely track who gets to work at 8 a.m. and who doesn't. Corporate is absolutely worthless in standardizing this and gives lip service to 'employee work/life balance' that means nothing. In any case, expect to work 50 hours a week at a minimum.

The ranking and rating/focal process is horrific and brutal. It takes up about 4 months a year when you include normal focal and mid-year focal, and the results don't justify it. It does make the place a dog-eat-dog killer of a place to work, where you are never really sure you won't get rated low unless you are doing your best, but the paranoia it inspires and the pain is unneeded and unnecessary.

Upper management is very, very smart, and I am impressed by their ethics. However, they are ruthlessly brutal, and some of them will not hesitate to blackball you or run you out of the company if you cross them or fail to kowtow.

Biggest downside for the average employee is that Intel, despite being a 'high tech' company, gives its employees absolutely crap computers to work on. Four or five-year-old laptops are the norm unless you are doing silicon design or something that requires something newer. When my monitor died a year ago, I was given a new CRT monitor that I later found on Newegg for $60, and that I wouldn't have bought even for use at my house, and which, of course, died after only a few months. This sort of pennywise, pound-foolish idiocy abounds, except in the silicon fabs, where spending $100 million on a new stepper is considered just the cost of doing business (which it is, but come on, so are decent computers for the engineers).

Another downside is that despite being insanely profitable constantly, management constantly looks for more ways to keep this money from the rank and file. Profit sharing used to be 12.5% of salary when I started, then it went to 8%, now is at 7%, and they are clearly positioning it to go even lower. Health benefits are similarly being reduced.

Last but not least, there has been a strong 'diversity' push in the last few years, which would normally be great, but which has resulted in significant bias during focal and hiring against people who are not 'diverse'.

Stop treating IT like it is nothing but a loss center and a waste of money. IT can be a competitive advantage if you give your employees computers and IT manufactured more than 5 generations ago. Eat your own dogfood and 'walk the walk' when it comes to IT.

Share the fruits of our multi-billion dollar profits more with the employees who kill themselves working insane hours to make us successful.

Give up on the stock ever rising much more. It's been 10 years since it stopped going up, and we are too big for it to do much more anyway.

Find a way to better compensate employees in a market where this is the norm.