Teradyne Reviews

Former Employee – worked at Teradyne

Pros – Good people to work with.
Good 401k and health benefits.
Very flexible work schedule.
Profit sharing, when the company is making money.

Cons – Limited technical advancement. Teradyne outsources a lot of its technical work.
Business is very cyclical so expect layoffs every couple of years.

Advice to Senior Management – Listen to your employees. Employees can provide very good insights into how the business is being run, unfortunately due to the corporate culture, it is unwise to complain.

Former Employee – worked at Teradyne

Pros – The individual contributors at Teradyne are generally fabulous. The people who actually develop products are intelligent, knowledgeable, capable, and hard working.

Cons – Management treats employees badly, but in insidious ways. They use the stock price and profit sharing incent people into working themselves sick. The real reasons that folks work hard are that they have pride in their work and are terrified of being laid off.

Advice to Senior Management – Stop managing the company with reference to 13-week windows. You've already made many short-sighted decisions that are going to catch up with you or your successors.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Teradyne

Pros – Interesting technology that pushes the limits of the technology.
Surrounded by some very bright people with varied interests.
Nice campus
Great cafeteria!

Cons – layoffs nearly every quarter. Overstaffing in one area to get job accomplished quickly then "Skills rebalancing", translation we are done with you now and need to get rid of you to hire a different skill set.
Outsourcing of areas that should remain a core competancy.
Recrruiting the "best and brightest from key Universities and then not giving them any mentoring. Resulting in often bright innovative ideas, though poorly executed and greatly missed schedule

Advice to Senior Management – Hire the best and brightest but insure that they work under a senior person with experience in actually getting a product to market.

Former Employee – worked at Teradyne

Pros – Challenging work in regards to technology and time-frame (under crunch most of the time). Very knowledgeable people to work with.

Cons – Never sure of the direction of the company. Changed so many times it was hard to keep count. Not using current technology as far as software goes (C++ instead of C#).

Advice to Senior Management – Pick a direction and stick with it. People get very nervous and leave when so many layoffs occur quarter after quarter.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Teradyne

Pros – 1. benefits
2. great team of software engineers

Cons – 1. career growth opportunities
2. compensation is less compared to competition and industry
3. managers to engineer ratio is very low

Advice to Senior Management – 1. senior management should provide a career growth path
2. research compensation and re-align to match it with industry.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Teradyne

Pros – Very challenging technology.
Extremely talented group of individual contributors and first level managers.
No obvious age discrimination.
Opportunities for people from a wide variety of engineering disciplines.

Cons – Management has extreme problems making decisions and then sticking with those decisions.
Significant strain between east coast design center and west coast design center.
The company often seems more interested with process than with products.

Advice to Senior Management – Make decisions more quickly. Once a decision is made, execute on it (don't revisit it).
A 4000 person company needs to concentrate more on product development than on process development.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Teradyne

Pros – Good engineers, decent products, interesting projects.

Cons – Emphasis on process rather than actually accomplishing anything. Management can manage, but not lead.

Advice to Senior Management – Stop managing to the quarterly numbers. Pay attention to what your employees and customers are telling you.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Teradyne

Pros – Teradyne used to be a great place to work. It was located in downtown Boston, MA, an excellent location to work in and perks were good while job stability was there. The best this I liked about working at teradyne were the people, very down-toearth, helpful and laid-back engineers who were also very smart. Since it was an old company there was a lot of maturity among employees and not much of petty politics that is rampant in some companies these days. My immediate manager and technical lead were very helpful. But recently, it has become a totally avoidable place.

Cons – The biggest down side to Teradyne is its catastrophic upper management and its inability to make any consistent decisions. They have conducted a string of layoffs not only during the economic downturn but also in anticipation of, laying off some of their really good engineers as well. The employee morale are this company is extremely low and nobody feels valued enough to put their hard work into their products. The upper management also does not show that they CARE for their employees, they are all treated like assets which can be used and discarded at their convenience. It will require serious changes in upper management to actually turn this company around.

Advice to Senior Management – Hire Intelligently, Foster better management ethic so that employees feel valued, plan better so that you don't have to constantly layoff engineers.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Teradyne

Pros – In Agoura Hills, challenging technical problems. Very bright technical people to work with. Fast paced environment where time to market is critical.

Cons – Management cares about efficiency, profits, and not people. Industry is very cyclical...lots of layoffs. Be prepared to do spreadsheets and fill out time cards. You can't have a conversation with management that is not data based.

Advice to Senior Management – Focus on People more. Get someone with vision to think about the future. Innovation does not HAVE to be acquired, but they have to manage an innovate effort without all the metrics. The business is more than numbers.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Teradyne

Pros – Not many these days. This is a company that has laid off thousands of people, outsourced every job possible -EXCEPT senior management.

Other than that a decent benefit package, nice workplace, but not much else

Cons – Management is isolated, and does not practice what it preaches. Layoff after layoff... employees are treated like expenses. Senior management that protects itself, while laying off thousands of employees

An example of the hippocritical management - in 2008, many employees were forced to fly to Asia in coach, while the policy clearly stated long flights should be business class, and the senior staff contiued to fly business class.

Advice to Senior Management – First, cut your own ranks - 12,000 employees to 3000 employees, but more executive management than ever.

Second - be fair, don't allow the consistent protection of a few manager's "favorites" when laying off people.

Third, Remember that you have a job because many people work incredibly hard. Treat employees like assets, not expenses.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend