Pros
- Salary and Bonuses are less than say, Google or Amazon, but still quite good. ESPP in particular is great generally, and has been amazing over the past 10-ish years. - Fellow engineers tend to be dedicated and skilled. - Being in a fabless semiconductor company provides unique challenges compared to say, transmitting advertisements 1% faster.
Cons
- A switch to "Agile" development was done by people who have no idea what Agile is - Depending on your team, if you don't put 6 hours in per day in JIRA, you will get a nag email. Helping other teams? No way! Going to meetings? Well, not too many... - Corners are cut frequently. You will never feel proud of your work, always surprised it shipped. - Does some task require special expertise? Well here is a 1 hour meeting about it a week after the task needs to be done. Maybe just read the slides, no time to actually attend that meeting. Want to read a book to understand the topic better? No way, there is no JIRA task for that. - Employees complained about lack of Learning and Development resources so, they paid for Coursera. Not enough for all employees, so you may have to wait. No support for learning on the job, so I guess the idea is that you'll log in on a weekend to watch videos that are often freely available. - Very few retros/post-mortems, multiple chips will go by without your team stopping to explore why testplans are always being trimmed to be actually completed, and even then very few changes will be implemented. -Maybe you will work 12 hours a day , 7 days a week for months. Well enjoy your expensed lunches and dinners on the weekend, that's all it's going to get you. Counts for nothing towards management, Just say No when they ask.