KLA-Tencor Reviews

Pros

When things are slow, there is a lot of paid free time. Professional environment. Employees communicate well and respect others moral standards. Willing to help the employee when they get into a bind. Decent benefits.

Cons

Unpredictable environment as with any technology based company. When times are tough, benefits are the first to go. Big company mentality where the stock holders take precedence over the employees.

Advice to Senior Management

Make sure you reward your employees for going above and beyond their expected duties. Not just a pat on the back, give them some soft of incentive to keep them motivated.

Pros

Easy work environment
Low expectation from management
Not much pressure as long as you play the political game

Cons

Poor leadership in the IT organization with lots of politics
Senior management more interested in keeping their jobs than doing the right thing
Management addresses poor execution by consultants by blaming the employees and rewarding the consultants with more business
Having been at KLA for so long, did not realize how bad things were until I left and saw how other IT organizations function

Advice to Senior Management

Stop believing you guys are very good and go see how efficient and effective other IT organizations are.

Pros

Good Compensation
Market Leader in Semi Conductor Industry

Cons

Worst Interview Process
Extremely bad work life balance (14 hr/day)
Very less scope for cs engineers
Low class training for freshers .
Not much increase in salary

Pros

- Technical leadership over competitors and continuous R&D investment
- Company has a strong financial base and knows which way it's heading
- Salary is usually OK

Cons

- Kafkaesque administration, with lots of little rules and online forms to fill in, on usually very unstable and slow servers, which are very difficult to access from outside the office. E.g.: An expense report for a short 2-days biz trip can take ages to be finished and then even longer to go through expense approval. Be prepared to "lend" Thousands of dollars for 6 or 7 months to the company if you're in for a longer biz trip.
- The philosophy is: "in case of doubt, sack first, ask (yourself) questions later"... Or another one: "rules matter more than people".
- Like most US companies: hypocrite to the bone; issuing "values" that their employees are supposed to follow, while the company is happily ignoring them.
- Not trustworthy; doesn't keep promises (even if they're written down, signed, etc...), unless you really fight for it.
- Promotion is not based on merit but on politics

Advice to Senior Management

- Think about what (de-)motivates employees: money is sometimes less important than work environment
- Make sure employees have the right tools for their work (e.g. company phone for people working in the field, etc...)

Pros

Good bonus during good times

Cons

Heads roll when the industry is in one of its cyclical downs...which happens to be every 2-3 years!

Advice to Senior Management

Too focused on revenue figures, and squeezing the life out of every employee

Pros

There are some people here who are still focused on doing the right thing
The benefits are not the best but also not the worst in the industry

Cons

No incentive to do well in IT. IT management will get the credit for the work or the consultants
Difficult to respect the IT management here since they do not drive anything. They have come in from the business and don't know how to drive projects forward
CIO is surrounded by yes people. Difficult to hold an alternative view so people say nothing to keep their jobs
Continued use of offshoring with poor consultants on board. But it matters little since the intent is to keep FTE headcount low
Working hard and doing the right thing won't get you far. It is a politically charged environment where knowledge counts for little

Advice to Senior Management

It really is difficult to offer advice if no one has an incentive to listen or do anything about it. Doing the right thing is frowned again. There are just too many incidents that have led to no further repercussions that many people have just given up

Pros

Get to work with advanced technologies and some of the best minds in the scientific area. Great collaborative work environment.

Cons

Working hours can be long but that is expected in research and development. No significant cons as far as work environment goes.

Advice to Senior Management

Needs to expand into new technological area. K-T's expertise will be relevant in emerging markets not only confined to semiconductors.

Pros

Some very intelligent and dedicated people

Cons

CIO is all talk and all about self promotion
Other CIOs are more strategic, and have implemented greater technologies
Focused on his own career and sponsors initiatives that will help him move on to his next role
Makes decisions based on his ideas and views and then changes his tune when his decisions are not working
Has surrounded himself with a bunch of 'yes' men who cannot get a job elsewhere
Does not take advice or input, but blames others when his strategies fail
Recycles people from the business that are at a dead-end
Has created a disfunctional IT organization

Advice to Senior Management

Poor management
Poor to no decision making
IT management readily takes credit for others work
Management looking out for themselves
Risk averse
Not willing to stand behind decisions
Talent Management as a strategic objective is a joke

Pros

Good company history. Pay average though very slow growth. Follow the laws.
Smart engineering people. People in application team or system team get good visibility.

Cons

Very political, same as some other people said, no management, only co-ordinates. Brilliant people without strong connections try to hide their talent to avoid being targets. Almost no regular career path for average engineers.
Poor project management but no one pays for it. The who generate more bugs get more credit as the bug list shows they are busy, sometimes in order to show they are working they even delay the fixes.
The team worked well only in down-turn as bushitting was not allowed. In up-turn, the managers hire more than enough but without much team performance improvement. A lot of email and meeting tricks. Some people grab other people's rights of speaking. Arbitrary performance review depending on only the relationship to the manager. No peer review, fake upstream review, and useless company wide chat board as people dare not to speak the truth.
Most managers are good at creating PPT, translating the words, information control(avoiding engineers to know essential information), and getting credits.
Cheap patent awards. Creative ideas not encouraged if without manager's involvement.
Bad IT support. Many times after the IT team install something, your PC gets extremely slow.

Advice to Senior Management

The IT team seems to be out of order, not only the technical side. The technical pace of the company is too slow since the document servers and source control servers are very slow. It can not be solved by investing money only.
Why not publish open problems within the company and allow other divisions to help?

Pros

Awesome technology, the products themselves are fascinating and always had interesting challenges. Company always knew how to make money and in upturns has always been successful. A good company to own stock in.

Cons

Ups and downs of the semi-conductor industry meant that management always had to watch the books closely. There were a lot of hiring and firing binges when I worked there. It also seemed like every quarter the level of pressure and stress went up a notch.

Advice to Senior Management

Walk around and talk to employees more often.