Lam Research

No pros of working at SIG. You are better off with Etch or Dep (Oregon).

This review is only for SIG. I had a very good experience when I collaborated with Etch and Dep groups.

I started as a mid-level engineer in SIG hardware engineering. Toxicity is rampant, and you will be paid peanuts. This group simply does not want to collaborate with other groups. Not only will any new ideas you bring in be trampled, but you would be discouraged from giving your inputs or opinion. The direction is based on the whims and fancies of 2 Sr. Directors: 1 from Process and 1 from Engineering. The expectation is that you would have to simply nod and be a yes-man to everything. You would be told day in and day out how lucky you are to be a part of this organization, that you don't bring in any value, and that you are getting paid to learn. I never understood this last bit: why hire if you want to pay someone with the assumption that you are providing wages for them to learn?

The group sits on 3-4 legacy tools, and your everyday job is to break something and pretend to fix it for 4-5 months till people forget that the problem arose in the first place. You would have to be in constant fear of the reprimand or mood swings of the Directors. There is no visibility whatsoever. 14 people quit in 2 years in this group, and no one including HR cared as to why there was such a big turnover rate.

Any attempt to go above and beyond your job responsibilities and learn about the semiconductor tool would be discouraged. You would have to forget any basic hardware knowledge and say yes to any vivid imagination that the Directors have about how the semiconductor tool is functioning, and then conduct lots of tests and collect data and present what their idea of the problem statement and hypothesis is, along with the solution that they would have come up with based on their imagination of the problem statement.

Any attempt to solve the problem in an efficient and elegant way using a theory-backed solution would be immediately termed a "shortcut." Any tests that are conducted on the tool showing that their vivid imagination is wrong will be criticized by saying that the engineer does not have the right understanding, or "it cannot be!" I was astounded and quit pretty much immediately.

None - since no action was taken after all employees who have quit have left scathing reviews in the exit interview (only a few had since others were immediately shown the door) and also in the official survey interview that requested "feedback" which directly came from HR via email.

This review is only for SIG - I had a very good experience when I collaborated with Etch and Dep groups.