Dilbert-like, but otherwise not bad
Pros
Low pressure, at least for most. Reliable hours. Nice people. Bit of management politics, particularly site-vs-site (Menlo Park vs. Harrisburg). People at the Swindon site I worked with were all exceptionally nice. It's a big company that knows what it is - a big company. Sometimes they play around with being "entrepreneurial" or whatever but fundamentally they just make a ton of products and sell them for more than the cost of making them, which is more than most startups can say.
Cons
It's Dilbert. The company is gigantic, top-level decisions arrive either super gradually through the rumor-mill or like immediate unexpected edicts from another planet (like when they sold the site to Facebook!). Cultures vary dramatically by site. Dilbert Dilbert Dilbert. Just read Dilbert. Middle-managers can be good or bad, sometimes both in the same person at different times. They seem to swap them out often enough that you never really get too happy or too angry. Some managers stink, oftentimes the ones that have been there for ages and know nothing else, but I think that's pretty normal. My own direct manager was both very talented and super burned-out from semiconductor companies. The individual was way more talented than her immediate superior at the time, so she basically slummed it and recovered from the years of intense work for a while. She still did stuff, but...you know...at a relaxed pace for a few years there. She wasn't the only one in that boat. Some slummed it for years, others got into more time-sensitive roles, others left. It wasn't a fit for me personally, but that should take nothing away from the company. Small companies are a better fit for me for reasons to do as much with my own pathos as my virtues. Equity stakes mean a lot to me for motivation, even if by-and-large they aren't worth anything since most small companies don't make it. At TE your bonus is dependent on performance of the entire business unit, which in R&D we had no effect on in the short-term. Exhortations to work harder to get a bigger bonus struck us as utterly absurd. I was considerably underpaid relative to my education and level, but I also got the job in the depths of the recession so consider that a "note" rather than a "complaint" per se. I think it's more competitive when the financial world isn't on fire. In conclusion: Dilbert.
