Veeco Instruments – “Looking at Veeco? Keep looking.”

Pros

Santa Barbara is a great place to live.

Cons

Management is clueless and detached. Reorganizations seem to occur regularly at six month intervals, and these lead to three problems:

1. Projects get lost in the shuffle. As an engineer, you have no confidence that what you work on will still be considered a priority in six month's time.

2. Every reorg seems to introduce yet another layer of management. Even as a senior
engineer, I'm still five layers from the top. More and more of my time is spent generating
reports so that all of my bosses will look productive.

3. Management (especially the newest members) don't seem to know much about the technology they are supposed to be driving. Admittedly, it's arcane stuff, but there's no excuse.

Advice to Senior Management

Pay attention and try to figure out why people are leaving the company.