Altera Reviews

Pros

Benefits are alright
Bonus program
Company is trying to lift morale but not in the right areas

Cons

Political environment
Rules do not apply to all even employees at same level within certain departments
No work life balance for some
Low value of employees
Very little recognition for good work or results
Some managers do not care if employees are stressed out and do nothing to improve morale in the group.
No effective training or mentoring programs for new managers.
Some managers do not know the meaning of confidential meetings
Holidays are minimal compared to other companies

Advice to Senior Management

Pay attention, company morale is horrible.
Managers without experience, need to be mentored.
Need more HR support for employees.
Improve work life balance environment.
Encourage job advancement and mean it

Pros

Company is doing well and positioned to grow

Cons

Cannot grow purely on merit.
Need a god father to grow.
Management is getting big fat check for running lean, mean and burning out employees.

Advice to Senior Management

Need to get aggressive and care more for your employees

Pros

- A large degree of freedom to launch a new project as long as you can convince and show 'changes' to the management. Obama should be doing good there.

Cons

- Taking a big group of people to discuss but still no clear idea after meetnig
- There are not many career growth opportunities

Advice to Senior Management

The company needs to change to recognize and promote people base on result not who can talk more and talk nicely.

Pros

Smart people. Mostly honest.
Decent physical work environment. OK gym.
Decent cafeteria ($4 subsidy for lunch). Good technology and quality.
Decent salary and bonus.

Cons

No upper management visibility and feedback
Company is not aggressive. No real acquisitions.
Very few younger people. Hardly anyone under 40 YO.
Not many females.
Not viewed as innovative by our customers.

Advice to Senior Management

Upper management needs to relate more with rank and file.

Pros

Leading edge technology with some very talented individual contributors.

Cons

Middle management is very week

Advice to Senior Management

Middle management is very week. Senior management needs to recognize the problems then provide a chance to fix through training. If someone is not capable of improving then that person must find a different role.

Pros

- Friendly, relaxed, stable work environment with little office politics
- Predictable release schedules and working hours (overtime is rare) that provided good work-life balance
- Good compensation and benefits including many discounts and an onsite gym
- Some smart and talented people work there

Cons

- Management is too conservative
- Not much options for career advancement
- There's been too much outsourcing of workforce from San Jose HQ to Penang branch recently that it affects morale here.

Pros

work life balance. Company in niche market

Cons

mgmt rock the boat too much. mgmt very sensitive politically.Rob the poor and pay the rich in focal review. mgmt make job insecure.

Pros

Level of stress and work pressure is low compared other semicon IC companies.
There are good people throughout the organization.
Significant improvement in infrastructure and benefits (cafe, gym etc)

Cons

Middle management is generally incompetent and afraid of senior management.
Management by committee
No respect for employees.
Too many meetings and employees too isolated from decision making.

Advice to Senior Management

Give more responsibility to employees.
improve software support and Internal CAD
Management needs to walk the walk and talk the talk.

Pros

A nice collection of plants in the office.
The restaurant is nice.
The gym is free.

Cons

High stress environment.
Poor employee development and recognition for performance.
Office politics is tiresome.
A cult like environment.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on staff morale and making good products for the future. Stop obsessing about the numbers and everything else will fall into place. IP is not just source code or piece of silicon. IP is also employee's ideas and should be valued more

Pros

Very friendly people. very helpful and awesome community.

Cons

The job is very demanding and the workplace is very fast paced. If you're a smart person it's for you.