Pros

HGST still has a cash balance pension plan that company contributes 5% of salary automatically, but only applies to employees hired by mid-2004. Newer hires have a different 401k matching benefit. There is a great deal of teamwork, though partly due to necessity driven by significant attrition and layoffs over the past few years. I thoroughly enjoy my coworkers. There is never a shortage of projects to take on. It is a good environment to take on large projects to get recognition because there just is not enough engineers to assign to all of them. Senior management is also finally making headway toward profitability, though the current economic downturn could turn that progress on its head.

Cons

HGST produces drives in a commodity industry destined to decline with increased use of SSD storage. HGST recently announced an agreement with Intel to produce SSD server drives, but it provides no benefit to the majority of current HGST employees because we will not be manufacturing the memory, only integrating Intel memory into the final drive. The company has the worst HR team I could ever imagine. The HR team is ignorant, arrogant, and routinely nickel and dimes benefits from employees. There is not much real teamwork between the US and Japan sites which results in tremendous (and avoidable) overhead. I do believe that management is working through that. Young workers have been leaving because there is no clear path to advancement and salaries, and least for younger workers, are lower than I see posted on outside salary sites for similar job functions.

Advice to Senior Management

I have little access to senior management but middle management seems focused on the wrong things. They spend significant time looking at production charts while serious manufacturing problems--too many products and too many changes for a team our size to effectively manage--take their toll on employees stress level and moral.