Cypress Semiconductor Reviews

Pros

The company offers opportunities to work on self defined projects and rewards performance. Employees also get a chance to change roles and explore newer areas. The education assistance program is among the best in business

Cons

The management style needs a little getting used to. It is highly top down and process oriented.

Pros

Good experience with team members and peers
Some of the best brains of IIT, IIM, Stanford, Harvard, and other reputed schools work here
Generally people are extremely brilliant, very hard working, and passionate about their career and interest
Get to work on different types of documents
The Company has its own templates, style guides, and other documents in good quality and shape
Work from home option available

Cons

3 BHK rooms converted into an office space (at Chennai)
Pathetic politics inside the team
Donkeys have less work load than you do
Only female members are selected in the team; male members either leave the job or get fired if they are assertive; assertive female members face the same fate as male members do
Trainings on Technical Writing tools from the manager will be more like insulting you for not being familiar with the tools rather than teaching/instructing you on how to work efficiently on the tools
Copy-editing workshop; slowly turning into a data-entry workhouse
Hiring process takes more than a month's time (like in the US)

Advice to Senior Management

Spend your cash on infrastructure. Also, spend your cash on training people on different tools and processes.
Seek out good managers who are passionate about their work and love to train the people on different work. Hire Tech Comm managers for different location rather than only one who manages the entire Indian operation - helps to keep both the managers efficient, competitive, and an extra hand can always be a beneficial buffer and time-saver.

Pros

Work on leading technologies with top-notch engineers, excellent compensation

Cons

Meticulous management with aggressive, often unreasonable schedule

Pros

Excellent learning systems.
Solid new product development process.
Projects that start make it to production.
Good recognition for creating production parts.

Cons

Upper management is not customer and systems focused; most energy is spent looking inside the company. Main result is that project launch late and therefore need huge teams to meet very aggressive cycle times. There is a lot of management interference during projects.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on improving the new product idea engine. Get more mileage out of each technology/IP platform. Don't launch multiple large projects on a platform until it is ready.

Pros

Good package of compensation
Good culture and team spirit
Interesting products
Good Leadership of Management
Good market recognition of products

Cons

Process orientation could be less than it is
Work life balance is sometimes difficult, but as in many other companies too

Pros

Cypress makes an effort to hire the best people they can find, As an engineer your colleagues will be people you can respect for their talent as engineers. Expectations are very clearly communicated through "critical success factors" - a system for measuring and rewarding achievements.

Cons

Senior management seems to have no trust of those working under them, I have never seen so much micro management and monitoring of progress on an almost hourly basis. The goal is to avoid any schedule surprises, but the results seem to be lower morale and lower productivity while projects still manage to run later than planned.

Pay is average - not bad, but not great either. Stress and work/life balance considerations make this a less rewarding job than the salary alone may indicate.

Advice to Senior Management

Cypress has a thorough interview process and seems to identify good talent. Trust us. If you still don't like the results you're getting, maybe the problem lies in the processes and not the employees?

Pros

Employees have an opportunity to work on a broad range of things
Memo and Spec systems are a great way to capture key learning and protect IP
Disciplend use of metrics
Employees in San Jose get a good laugh watching the CEO run in his little shorts every afternoon

Cons

CEO: decisions big and small go through this bottleneck
SVPs: yes men that tell the TJR what he wants to hear
No focus on customers
Sweat shop
Employees are treated as "fungible"
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - AE

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on the customer to add value and solve their issues. The focus on reducing a customer's bill of materials (BOM) doesn't take advantage of, PSoC, the company's one innovative product.

Pros

Good pay
Amazing Benefits
Stock options
Great work
Variety of technologies

Cons

You do everything
No fixed career path

Pros

Stock options - if you got there when they were priced right and at the right number - were great.
Decent facilities, gym, etc.

Cons

Where do I begin?

The bureacracy is stifling. As a hiring manager it would take weeks to get an offer out the door. You need 3 signatures on the requisition, 7 to 10 on the offer, then wait for the CEO - that's right - the CEO to review and approve the offer. Then you need to get another 6-7 signatures on another approval form. Meanwhile your personal reputation is in shreds as candidates wait and move on to other organizations.

Design reviews are worse. There are Cypress lifers entrenched in every possible business process (called a "spec") looking for opportunities to trip you over. Of course, if it's another lifer's review, they pull the "do what's best for the business" card and move on. Outsiders, beware.

Chips have multiple groups in mulitple locations pulling every which way. A few "architects" laze away with a bunch of slides which never make it into a usable architecture document.

Schedules are top down, and therefore projects are almost always stressed out and late. That directly impacts your salary as the bonus program is linked to the schedule. Engineering gets
interesting as everyone's only interested in getting their stuff in, and they don't really work as a team.

Advice to Senior Management

No point, the losers in the second layer won't do anything to contradict the CEO.

Pros

- amazing products
- profit driven and delivers results
- stock has been profitable in recent years
- great core values that employees are constantly reminded of

Cons

- very poor compensation, salary, raises, promotions
- abusive management (verbally)
- no growth or learning that can be used outside of the company
- lack of recognition unless you are in top 5-10%
- lack of respect for people
- employees aren't treated as humans
- work under constant threat of being given the boot
- no appreciation of hard working loyal employees
- lack of vision for future
- VERY POLITICAL (can not emphasize this enough)
- haphazard business driven decisions, "Lets do this NOW, ALL OF YOU!"
- Stingy and miserly when it comes to spending money on professional industry standard tools (they like to home-brew EVERYTHING)

Advice to Senior Management

treat every employee as you expect to be treated by your investors. its the team that makes the company, not the individuals. quit with the politics. quit trying to enumerate TJ (it only works for him, the rest of you come off as jerks)