AMD Reviews in Toronto, ON Area

Pros

Work for the chipset department.

Cons

I was in a small division. Avoid such groups

Advice to Senior Management

Take care of your employees, it will pay back!

Pros

My particular job is relatively low pressure and I have been given some degree of control over what I work on.

Cons

It is a big company that is spread over many countries (many time zones, languages). Management is completely focused on getting the next products out the door and does not care about employee career development.

Advice to Senior Management

It might be typical for large companies but it would be nice to see managers communicate and cooperate better with each other rather than trying to protect their own little empires.

Pros

There is nothing good about working at AMD other than you get a salary to pay for your bills every month.

Cons

Once upon a time I was a very enthusiastic engineer until I spent a few years working for AMD. Working at AMD will destroy you, things here are done terrible, starting for upper management all the way down to engineer level.
There is a lot of politics, a lot of management decisions are taken without even considering or asking engineers about the technical side.
Most of the teams are very bad, managers have ZERO management skills, everyone knows that things are wrong but at the same time, they know that things wont change.
There is an unbelievable LACK of responsibility and ownership. All the time the projects are behind, there is no clear schedules, a lot of cross-site work with Shanghai, India and multiple sites in US, decision making is very slow.
People is not recognize for your work, unless you are very very friend of your boss, they will recognize it, because managers are SO SO BAD, that they dont even know what their employees are doing.
In summary, this is a nightmare, please stay away from AMD if you can, if you are already working for AMD, wake up! and switch to another company before it is too late.

Advice to Senior Management

fire yourself, you guys are terrible to work for, there is so many things to be changed at AMD, that it is impossible to imagine the company doing well.

Pros

Its a job that pays some of the bills.

Cons

There is no room for advancement. All previous additional benefits (stocks, bonuses, etc...) no longer apply to my position after merging with AMD. Absolutely, no pay increase since the merger.

Pros

good place to know talented people, and good place to learn graphics since it has good engineer and technical assets. Pretty good process management

Cons

working hours is not good. Sometimes have to work long hours, and the future seems not that bright since the company still not profitable for n quarters.

Advice to Senior Management

less micromanagement. Some managers are pure technical without any managing experience, and they really need to improve people management skills

Pros

If you want to learn the best in technology, AMD is for you.

Cons

Number 2 mentality (After Intel always). Lack of career growth.

Advice to Senior Management

Must have a leadership program.

Pros

Always pushes the envelope of technology.

Cons

Communication from management is poor.
Compensation, like bonus's and stock options are poor.
Work becomes one fire storm after another.

Pros

AMD Markham had an amazing assortment of technical talent in all positions. All engineers I found myself interacting with were extremely competent, and for the most part, quite friendly. My co-workers were usually happy to answer any questions I had regarding their area of expertise. As a result I received some very good advice in regard to design methodology, which was not properly covered during my University education.

Individual teams were all focused and dedicated to their tasks. There was seldom any confusion regarding the purpose of a team, or the results that were expected of them. Intra-team politics were generally quite low key, and were seldom more serious than personality conflicts among incompatible team members. Fortunately management was able to contain even those such that team productivity did not suffer.

I also very much enjoyed the large amount of personal freedom given to employees. Work hours were not very strict, and the engineers were free to come and go as needed; it was not uncommon to see and impromptu tech discussions develop over coffee. Management would generally adopt a hands-off approach, only micro-managing during crunch times, which were thankfully quite short. Team-wide meetings were also a very positive and friendly experience for everyone involved.

Cons

Unfortunately, AMD is quite old for a tech company, and it shows. To make matters worse, the AMD and ATI merger was not nearly as smooth as it could have been, resulting in a lot of conflicting processes and incompatible data organization styles. Also, while most technical personnel were very reasonable and professional, there were some people in very high positions that let the seniority really go to their head.

AMD has been operational for over 40 years, while ATI has been going for 25 years, only 5 of which were as part of AMD. During this time both of these companies saw momentous shifts in technology, and in many cases were right at the center of these shifts. Over such a long time a lot of processes are developed to address a huge range of problems that inevitably arise during operation. Unfortunately, being on the leading wave of technology means that most of these processes could not take advantage of the innovations they help to implement.

Once a company of this size defines a number of new processes, standard corporate mentality takes over and the short-term cost of optimizing these processes becomes very difficult to justify on the balance sheets. The result is that these decisions can easily live on for decades, until replacing them becomes an emergency concern, with all of the associated headaches, rushed specifications, and buggy implementations. Of course the existence of competing standards defined within the scope of ATI before it was acquired effectively doubles the number of stakeholders, and makes the problem not only more challenging, but also more pressing.

Also as a result of the age of these companies, relevant information is extremely hard to find. The company wide search is about as advanced as a search engine of the mid 1990s, and will only respond to some very creative search term voodoo. Often times the only way to get some information is to ask someone familiar with the topic where to find the data you are looking for. This is not a difficult task when you can ask a team member, but becomes exponentially harder the further away you have to look.

Finally, while most personnel, both technical and management, are very helpful and professional, there are a few people in senior positions that are quite the opposite. Over the years, certain people have managed to take control of very large and important projects, and now make working in these project domains extremely difficult. Often these situations are a result of personal or cultural problems, but the resulting political dancing necessary to fix even the smallest issue is daunting for an engineer without a political background; this includes most of those on a non-management track.

Advice to Senior Management

The problems faced by AMD Markham are the same as many other companies of similar age, and with a similar background. The solutions are likewise rather similar: First and foremost, the company needs to work towards a more well-defined mentoring process to reduce the control presently exercised by the senior technical personnel. This means that more responsibility needs to move from from senior engineers to those down the ladder, and the resulting free time should be used to train younger engineers in both design and implementation, as well as company specific processes and information.

Next, process evaluation should be done based on more than the short-term costs of updating the process. While there are a number of areas where the change required may require up to a year of work, the resulting improvements in efficiency could save easily save tens of thousands of working hours per year in the future.

Ideally, AMD should hire some real integration and optimizations experts to actually integrate the old ATI sites with the new AMD processes, and point out where these processes may be bottlenecking productivity. Given the scope of the problems this would necessarily be quite an investment, but it is a vital move if AMD hopes to create and carry on any momentum to compete with the other juggernaut in this market.

Finally, AMD needs to really re-evaluate the team organizational structure. While intra-team cooperation is very effective, inter-team communication is very limited. Many teams that depend on other internal projects have very little direct communication with those responsible for said projects. Often times there is at least one, if not more teams in between, resulting in a very long game of telephone. As a result, the amount of repeated work performed in various parts of the company is staggering. There are very complex problems are solved differently by four or even five different groups, creating artificial walls between teams that should otherwise work much closer to each other.

Pros

Work is challenging as chips are more complex.

Cons

Poor advancement
Salary raises are not comparable

Pros

* Opportunity to work with knowledgeable co-workers
* Somewhat Flexible work hours
* Good communication with co-workers
* Customer centric business model is admirable

Cons

Creativity and productivity is stifled by:
      * Workload and frequent overtime
      * Slow paced decisions and funding by management
      * Focus on procedures instead of getting the job done
      * Aiming for unrealistic success instead of realistic goals

Advice to Senior Management

Work on the cons, hire more people, encourage creativity and please start talking to the people on the bottom that are keeping the company afloat.