Pros

The people here are all friendly and always willing to help even if the problem is out of their specialty.

Cons

The constant layoffs could be an emotional strain.
Upper management does not do a good job in keeping the employees posted about how the company is doing and where the company is heading.

Advice to Senior Management

Communicate with the employees more consistently.

Pros

Laid back work environment, competitive wages and benefits, lots of creative and smart people. Routine employee events and quality resources.

Cons

Obviously the fact that they weren't making any money has to be taken as a negative. Layoffs were routine and damaging to morale. Constant management turnover made it challenging to clearly communicate objectives from the top down.

Advice to Senior Management

Since I left before the merger with LTX, I don't know enough about the new environment to give any legitimate advice to management.

Pros

Credence's pay does not seem to be bad. It's a great place to be exposed to a lot of different system design issues. People under estimate the difficulties in developing ATE systems, but I actually got to deal with a lot of interesting problems.

Cons

Management took too long to make decisions. The product positioning seems to be consistently wrong compared to competitors like Teradyne. There are actually some good engineers in the company, but there talent and energy are wasted working on projects that never got shipped. Historically, the company never developed a successful product internally. All the products that sold well were acquired.

Advice to Senior Management

Now that Credence is bought and soon will be killed, there is not much I can say.

Pros

If you can not find any where else then work for this company.

Cons

No current R&D
No new projects
Pay for employees have been cut several times and now its what the pay was 5 - 7 yrs ago.
Management does not have a sense of direction and the Managers are not really engineers/Technical ppl
Every manager in the company works to save his own position not for the employees he manages

Advice to Senior Management

Get some sense of direction. You guys have screwed up the company and employees enough.

Pros

Reasonable Benefits. Good People. Reasonable Team work

Cons

Horrible Top Management. No Vision at all. Extreme short term focus. Too much management turnover

Advice to Senior Management

Credence has merged with LTX. Tough job, because even after the merger the company will be a distant No 4 in a shrinking business, in a commodity market. It needs to develop differentiated products to survive.