Finisar Reviews

Pros

Latest Technology company, small organisation

Cons

Nothing much some management faults

Pros

Ok place to work, when they have work to do. People who work in the assembly are are nice. Some engineers are nice.

Cons

False hope of having a long term job. Don't expect to work there more than a year. They move all products to other countries for assembly and testing. This company is exactly what is WRONG with American manufacturing and why we are failing as a country.

Very poor management. Our group would go days with our manger speaking to us. He would sit at his desk on his computer or be talking to someone in another department for hours, but he never addressed our group or said hello. If you are a buddy of your manager and socialize with him outside of work (ie buying him drinks), your job should be safe as they tend to keep their "favorite employees" around longer.They ask you to work overtime on the weekend and then when you go to work on Monday there is nothing to do and you just sit around for hours doing nothing. They waste a lot of money by doing this but they don't seem to care.

Advice to Senior Management

Treat people fairly and tell people the truth, please.

Pros

I got a good pay for the type of work I was doing. The hours were very flexible and the people pretty friendly.

Cons

People in the office were usually pretty busy and there was not much time for interaction. I wish I would have found out earlier that would not need me any more.

Advice to Senior Management

The leadership was pretty good. The head engineer in my office was friendly. I got to meet only one person from higher management, so I can't really comment much about it.

Pros

Good location with the good employees well being facilities, e.g. Health care room and gym. Some of the team members are good, but mostly are just work with no words due to a very micro manage leadership.

Cons

The senior management especially at Malaysia only take care of their own cronies. The turnover rate for engineers/managers/senior managers are high. Each of the new hire managers are bonded two years. Usually manager will leave once reach two years. The promotion of the managers also base on Cronyism. The senior management will be willing to rehire managers that has very poor leadership skills or performance traits and willing to let go the performance managers.

Advice to Senior Management

Learn the true meaning and value of these three words: honesty, integrity and be humber.
These are not the dictionary meaning, and not to use as devicive tools, but as a way of being.

Pros

high tech company that is a leader

Cons

everyone mostly are backstabbers, outsourcing the business to asia

Advice to Senior Management

focus on the us employees

Pros

Very cooperative and encouraging towards learning

Cons

little biased and little political like other orgs

Pros

It being super nice if you are stay long enough. As i know, one of the Vietnam guy making easy dollars here, more than 68hrs on time-sheet, but hanging around in mostly time.

GYM area

Flexible

Cons

Poor management, mess up everywhere

Advice to Senior Management

Performance review for mid-term managers and lead person in every 6 moths

Documentation control improvement

Hire some more of quality person

Pros

collegial atmosphere among and between most workgroups. bright, and mostly idealistic, people who try harder because of competitive industry segment. flexible working hours. casual and informal work environment. attempt to create a "we are family" atmosphere.

Cons

senior management flounders around when creating a strategy, fails to get buy-in from everyone (when it even bothers to communicate strategy out to the rest of the company), executes poorly. average age of senior mgmt is fairly high, wonder what they've learned at prior positions. approach to work is blue-collar type of "git 'er done" mentality. approach to competitors is either "shoot 'em up" like a bunch of cowboys or throw money at them by buying them out; only to realize after the fact that the IP or market share purchased is worth mostly tiddly-winks. management is by personality instead of by principles. weird incestuous relationship between senior management team where they will fight tooth and nail among themselves, but gang up in a moment against anyone outside senior management team.

Advice to Senior Management

stop sweethearting money to senior management to buy their loyalty. loyalty that is bought cannot be kept when the money dries up. outsource processes as necessary, critical company IP has already been stolen many times over. with outsourcing you at least can zero in on the source of the leaks or thefts. get out of mainland china, they're a smug bunch of thieves. get out of malaysia, their greatest ambition in life is to match the smugness and thievery of the chinese operations. move cleanroom manufacturing to north-central thailand. either create operational processes or buy them off the shelf, simply accept the fact that we are weak on process-orientation. get off the "gee-whiz" high of super-cool finisar technology, we don't have an exclusive on the tech and never will.

Pros

People at Finisar are very nice and company is trying hard to keep it this way. I heard from several people that it's so imporatnt fot them that they would be reluctant to switch company even if somebody else would offer them a 10-15% higher salary. Company currently is number one in the world in terms of market share of optical components ( modules).
Senior management is generally resonable. Most of the times they do smart things. unfortunately, when they do make mistakes, mistakes are terrible and have negative influence on company's valuation ( read stock price) for years. That's it

Cons

Number one problem is lack of career opportunites. Because US R&D head count basically stays constant over years and all manufacturing side has been moved overseas, there are essentically no career oppotunities at Finisar US.
Second problem is a broken business model. Finisar sells optical components to large companies. Cisco is number 1 or number 2. While Finisar is constantly struggling to be profitable, Cisco, HP and other brands resell Finisar products to their customers for literally 10 times of what they pay to Finisar. It certanly makes it very hard for Finisar to become profitable. Stiff competition does not make it easier. Plus, history of M&A shows Finisar senior management beleives it's competitors are always have superior technology. Only after deal is done managers realize price they paid was too steep. It happened 4-5 times and apparanetely management learned nothing

Advice to Senior Management

Think twice about new M&A. Expand into new areas like Test & Services