AMD Reviews in Toronto, ON Area

Pros

AMD attracts highly talented individuals. The company is widely recognized as a leader in innovation in its field and has truly changed the game in the microprocessor/chipset industry. When working at AMD, one is expected to continuously think about improving processes and the quality of the products.

Cons

Employee engagement and career promotion and training opportunities are not always taken seriously by management. Many of the managers in the company do not have any business experience and instead come from a purely technical background, and thus lack essential skills in employee engagement and motivation. Workload can vary widely across departments or groups. Plans are changed too frequently due to poor forecasting/planning and there is a feeling within the company that this leads to too much wasted effort. The company constantly struggles financially and this has affected employee compensation significantly in the past.

Advice to Senior Management

Improving employee engagement and providing training opportunities as well as a clear and more uniform path for career advancement could definitely encourage employees to stick with the company for longer periods of time.

Pros

Helps you to learn latest technologies.

Cons

Same as many companies, you have to deal with a lot of politics.

Pros

Very supportive and helpful co-workers and management. Lots of opportunities to learn for new grad employees.

Cons

Cutbacks every year and losing many benefits that were initially there. Limited space in facilities leading to smaller cubes, limited meeting spaces, etc. due to cutbacks. Employees are not properly recognized for their accomplishments. Very tight deadlines and expectations set by management that are usually not realistic causing lots of unpaid overtime hours. Projects are usually not scheduled and resourced properly leading to many projects lining up one on top of the other leading to times with very heavy workload and times with less work. Sometimes groups tend to play the blame game and focus on the negative and not on the positive.

Advice to Senior Management

Stagger projects to be more efficient. Need more space. Need to innovate and get into new technologies and applications. "Shouldn't have sold Handheld BU, could have been perfectly positioned for new generation of low power mobile solutions that competition is getting into just now"

Pros

Lots of learning opportunities - smartest people to create hi tech complex products. Truly special people.

Cons

Work life balance. Canadian branch (ATI) knows how to maximize employees creativity and commitment by encouraging entrepreneurialism, but U.S. branch (controlling most of AMD) has stifling influence due to excessive process and reporting requirements. Counterproductive to accelerating product introduction pace.

Advice to Senior Management

reduce hierarchy and encourage entrepreneurialism.

Pros

Competitive salary, flexible hours, nice environment and culture, cool technology and products to work with, very little office politics, friendly colleagues, nice building and location

Cons

Not so great benefits package for interns, repetitive work projects, cut down on free holidays, not too many social events

Advice to Senior Management

Prevent product deployment delays by choosing third-party tools that are easy to integrate into AMD environment and come with quick technical support; Need to do Intel-style marketing on TV's and Internet;

Pros

Lots of great learning opportunities with work life balance. The things that you learn at AMD will allow you to get ahead when you jump to another company.

Cons

No room for advancement. Management prefers to hire from outside. Even senior management has left AMD to pursue other opportunities only to return to director level+ roles.

Advice to Senior Management

promote from within

Pros

Flex hours. You can get away with just about anything. Not micromanaged in any way. Many people actually run their own businesses from there (i.e. mail order cell phone accessories, etc.).

Cons

Management was extremely disorganized. Can't plan, scope projects. Projects continually cancelled, understaffed, late, finished hastily with bugs. Management often blaming project status on subordinates - so will take time off while the team tries to finish projects under the gun - and they aren't around when you need authorization, etc.

Advice to Senior Management

There's really no point to give advice. This location has been the (victim) of many mergers, takeovers, divestitures (since before ArtX days). This breads political in fighting, and butt covering instead of actually trying to do a job well. Inbred management culture where very little outside blood doesn't help - it's UofT engineers out of school getting trained by UofT engineers who've only worked in one place. Bad habits just keep multiplying because it's the culture - fit in or get lost. Also some racial tension between the Mandarin, Cantonese, Russians, Indians/Sri Lankans, and the few whites.

Pros

an exciting place to work but very intense, nice colleagues to work with at engineer level (depending on the group you are placed in)

Cons

Engineer driver culture, poor managers, multi-levels of low level managers added complexity and reduced efficiency, personalities are allowed to override experience, better reward and recognition practices is needed

Pros

AMD attracts many great workers. 3 of the 8 team members I worked with had PhD's, years of experience and were at the highest level on the engineering ladder. These team members were great to work with and I was able to learn a lot.

Cons

Teams withing AMD seem to pass the blame a long. Rather than asking for support or assistance, teams blame other teams to get rid of the problem. This causes massive delays during the development process.

Advice to Senior Management

Embrace collaboration and refrain from placing blame. Convince teams to work together and communicate well and AMD will be a stronger company.

Pros

- good technology
- good prod management teams

Cons

- HQ is in Austin, room for growth in Marketing is limited
- very north american centric for a WW company

Advice to Senior Management

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