Altera Reviews

Pros

Great place to learn about programmable logic and system design.
Salary is industrial standard. Good people to work with and share thoughts.

Cons

It is not "WHAT" you know, but "WHO" you know to get a good performance review or pay raise.
Manager will take credit for your hard work without proper reward so that they can get promoted and stock options. The work environment is very political.

Advice to Senior Management

Treat your people like human, not machine.

Pros

at the top level the company is well run. Very fiscally conservative, and don't take too many risks.

Cons

if you don't get along with your manager they will not allow you to switch to another group; They take performance reviews very seriously and are way too overzealous about them.

everything is done by the book and there is no flexibility at all.

Advice to Senior Management

treat employees with more respect; allow employees to change managers if they don't get along with them.

Pros

Good benefits, good pay, very good health benefits, education reimbursement

Cons

no growth, no communication between departments, employees are treated with disrespect, lot of politics

Advice to Senior Management

Treat people like they are people. Employees shouldn't be treated badly based on other employee's feedback- rather their work should be looked at.

Pros

You have the opportunity to work on interesting, cutting edge technology. Your co-workers are uniformly friendly and generally responsive. Most of the employees have a good work-life balance.

Cons

The company culture overall is quite conservative, particularly by Silicon Valley standards. Conformity is valued very highly and sometimes it can be difficult to initiate change in the organization. It can be difficult to advance within the company.

Advice to Senior Management

I would suggest communicating more openly with the employees, particularly in the United States. Due to the shrinking of the U.S. employee base and the growth of the employee base in Asia, U.S. employee morale has suffered.

Pros

Nice, cutting edge technology, growing business.

Cons

Low competence of some managers, lack of objectivness.

Advice to Senior Management

Review your managers.

Pros

A large number of motivated, intelligent people -but- they're all working too hard on knocking items off their to-do lists to have a conversation. Lot of opportunities to pick up special projects and run with them.

Cons

Not enough recognition of hard work. Too much emphasis on face time and not nearly enough tech support to enable employees to work effectively away from the office. Certain offshore jobs need to be returned to San Jose -- if something is time sensitive, it doesn't make sense to have a San Jose employee waiting around all day for a Penang employee to come into the office. Why are systems constantly changing (rarely for the better), why don't they work, why aren't employees trained on how to use them effectively? HR and IT are woefully understaffed.

Advice to Senior Management

Offer greater clarity about the goals of the department and the relationship of those goals to an employee's personal goals. Don't be so stingy! Management is thrifty to a fault and is going to lose a lot of employees over this. Work on getting rid of silos by providing opportunities for groups to interact socially. Be mentors!

Pros

Good products; good technology from TSMC; strong engineers

Cons

VP and directors too political: employee performance is highly dependent on how well they talk instead of their actual contributions

Advice to Senior Management

Set up anonymous paths to collect feedbacks; pay attention to front line managers; thoroughly evaluate whether the company needs so many directors (some dept has a 3:1 employee:manager ratio)

Pros

Extremely focused organization, amazing people and great technology. Technology exciting and promising to become mainstream size of semiconductors and Altera is in the perfect position to benefit from this change.

Cons

Focus can be a double edged sword for people that do not understand Altera's decision making process, and the process can frustrate such employees. Fortunately there are a number of people that are willing to help.

Pros

Solid well-run semiconductor company, cutting edge chips. Excellent pay-scale & benefits. A very competent traditional patriarchal corporate structure, if you like that sort of thing.

Cons

Since Altera comes from a chip-manufacturing background, planning ahead an minimizing risks are deep in the corporate DNA. If you're a software engineer, this can be... burdensome.

Advice to Senior Management

The chips are great, keep that up. The competitive advantage will increasingly be in your software tools. If you want to create great tools, you need great software engineers who love to make tools, and you need to let them do so.

Pros

Good pay.
Stock is rising
R&D investment is growing
Hiring in the US!

Cons

Still risk adverse.
Growth strategy is hard to pinpoint.