Texas Instruments

You will be given as much responsibility as you show you can handle, quickly, and will have lots of opportunity to learn new skills.

If you have deep specialization in areas that are important to the business, you will (probably) have pretty good job security, as long as the company stays in that business area.

Entitlement mentality towards uncompensated labor from middle and upper management.

Highly political and sometimes bullying environment, entrenched mediocrity in middle management, and "blame the troops" backstabbing from incompetents.

Managers and employees who understand and accept the status quo of "needing" to be highly political take credit for the work of others who won't or haven't figured out how to play the political game.

Unspoken but well-known mafia system where those who get made survive all layoffs regardless of whether they maintain their business or technical edge, and get to wet their beaks at the bonus pool whether they put in a strong contribution for the year or not.

Company and upper management shift the product strategy and cede markets to nimbler competitors with regularity.

Poor documentation and dissemination of company-specific technical knowledge means that such knowledge resides only with those who are willing to throw work/life balance in the trash and do organizationally inefficient individual from-scratch learning (basically reverse engineering the company's own IP), creating a perverse differentiator for compensation and advancement, a two-class technical staff, and key personnel risks for the company.

If you are a talented and creative individual, you are selling yourself incredibly short by becoming a lifer here.

Identify and promptly remove the no-talent political weasels in middle management. These people hang on for decades, creating internal rot and blocking the paths of more capable subordinates.

Drive from the very top down a culture of true meritocracy. The current CEO has plenty of stories about the careers of others being thrown under the bus in order to advance. Career competitiveness is good, but only when it's meritocracy-based and not grade school playground bullying.

Earn every penny of your outsized compensation packages by driving a coherent, sustainable, high-margin product strategy that rains big buckets of money on the rank-and-file engineers who sacrifice evenings and weekends to make the products happen. In other words, make it so that it is actually economically rational for employees to obsess about the company as much as you want them to.

Stop insulting your employees' intelligence by trying to "compensate" them with "psychic rewards." Nobody can pay their bills with "psychic rewards." The company is not a charity, and neither are the employees. Employees want their hard work to matter, financially. Not in some vague, foofy, psychic reward kind of way.

There are lots of very bright people here, and the company could be really great if they had the guts to fix their culture and the vision to know what an enlightened culture actually looks like.