Actel Reviews in Mountain View, CA

Pros

The work environment is good

Cons

Not a lot of growth oppurtunities

Pros

They had a ping pong table in the gym which was pretty solid. Oh and the free food they had at lunches sometimes. And drinks.

Cons

The company no longer exists. They had a poor environment. It was always depressing because people were getting laid off left right and centre.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop firing people. Its depressing. Pick a direction and go with it and go with the one thats going to make you money.

Pros

People are friendly.
Atmosphere is generally good.
Processes are good.
Employer has a good health plan and goes above and beyond for people with health issues.

Cons

Most of the growth seems to be in India
Management focus is divided between Mountain View and India and centers mostly on India
Feels understaffed after the layoff with some voluntary turnover after the layoff.
Okay for hardware, not a great place to work for software.

Advice to Senior Management

Need to get a better buy-in from employees to work with India because employees see it as nickel and dime cost cutting and not a good long term approach. Need better incentives to keep good software engineers because even though the economy is down, hiring for programmers has increased.

Pros

layoffs are over or so it seems

Cons

There is no room for growth as very few senior level people were let go during layoffs compared to beg-mid level engineers.

Advice to Senior Management

He is leaving actel in a few months...

Pros

benefits are good
work expectations are usually reasonable

Cons

not much room for growth
management makes questionable decisions
historically aenemic stock growth
atmosphere of layoffs in recent quarters

Advice to Senior Management

fewer nickel and dime cost cutting measures
more performance incentives

Pros

Flexible work schedule usually permitted

Cons

The environment here is one of hostile, ignorant and incompetent.

Advice to Senior Management

Get rid of nepotism and favoritism in the company. Some old timers are simply not up to the task anymore.

Pros

Flexibility in work hours.
Great location.
Some interesting products and strategies to go after new markets.
Many smart and experienced coworkers.

Cons

Slow moving.
Never seem to make any gains in terms of revenue/growth.
Company wants more done with less (several RIFs).
Offshoring a lot of engineering.
Future innovation seems questionable based on recent corporate decisions.

Advice to Senior Management

The company has been fractured with the offshoring, morale is low, and you're in danger of losing key contributers when the economy turns around. If something isn't done to address this, I don't see a very bright future for the company.

Pros

John East, CEO, is very approachable and knows all employees by name. Respect for management and employees. Competitive pay, Management encourages work life balance. Great work location and a fabulous gym. Awesome college internship program.

Cons

Average career advancement. Technology not very exciting. Hit hard by recent economic downturn.

Advice to Senior Management

Have stronger vision.

Pros

Over the people at the company are pretty competent. Flexible managers, relatively good benefits. Small company, which means you need to interact with people from a variety of different departments, giving you the opportunity to learn a lot of things.

Cons

Work can get repetitive. Products don't seem to be going anywhere, and the company doesn't seem to be doing that well financially.

Advice to Senior Management

Company needs a new direction. Going "green" doesn't really work when the products you are producing aren't competitive on speed or features.

Pros

Very understanding and flexible about time off for personal reasons.

Cons

Business Areas do not take impacts to other business areas into account when creating new processes. Manual work arounds are common. Many cause problems in other business areas. Systems to support these processes are therefore jury-rigged and difficult to modify (or even understand in some cases). No one has the big picture from a systems perspective and IT, while expected to have a big picture, is considered a drag on any project, so is never told enough info to get the big picture. IT is also hampered by severe resource constraints.

Finally, in recent years there have been so many mandatory shut downs (take vacation or no pay) that it is impossible for a new employee to accrue time off. Also, they do not match 401K.

Advice to Senior Management

Give IT enough resources to be effective, and re-enforce support for IT by discouraging non-IT projects that impact multiple business areas. Encourage business areas to work with other areas PRIOR to business process changes and each area should step up to own thier own business data and how the systems they use represent that data and the associated business processes. NOTE: Enough IT resources means to have at minimum 2 resources(primary and backup) for each production system.