Applied Materials reviews

As I have read in other reviews, too much work politics as the company is literally structured as a FFA resource fest with too many stretch goals, insufficient resources, slightly incompetent upper management. This is the result of being in too many spaces and spread too thin. Also, being a publically traded company, too much emphasis on the short term bottom line with shareholder ass-kissing (and still doing poorly) over taking care of employees. Additionally, benefits are only average, especially for a high tech company.

The culture is highly politicized. Organizations devolve into warring camps in which giving ground on a issue (technical, operational, financial) is seen as a losing power. Business unit leaders and their direct staff seem to spend more time competing with other internal divisions than with Applied's competitors. Key operations decisions are superficially fact-based but in reality depend more on who is currently in or out of favor with key operations executives. Applied has and continues to make a huge investment in the solar business but in my estimate has neither the the technology nor the business model to be successful. It will be interesting to see how many solar factory contracts are landed in the new capital market environment. Probably not many.