Lam Research Reviews

Pros

Nice pay and bonus, benefit is good.
Excellent technology,very data oriented, efficient and well run, you can find and read a lot of internal technical reports.
Financial data is Leading in this industry.

Cons

Life work balance is bad. OT is a culture in this company.
Many employees are quite anti social. There should be more fun activities inside of the company.
The semiconductor equipment industry is not stable. Lam likes to hire a lot during the upturn and lay off a lot in the downturn.

Advice to Senior Management

Avoid massive layoff. Give employees more family time.

Pros

Benefits
Interesting work
Great people
Good top executives' leadership

Cons

Slow to change
Inefficient run of projects
Middle Management could be much more efficient

Advice to Senior Management

Apply the same urgency to proper planning as is placed on execution. As the industry matures, we need to become more efficient as well as faster.

Pros

Strong orientation to company values
Good salaries and benefits
Fairness

Cons

Too many hierarchy levels
Too many rules & regulations which sometimes slows down processes

Pros

Great work place,
Great people,
Great salary,
Great proportion of males to females.
Horizontal structure between management and employees.
Not many over time work.

Cons

As you might know, Lam research is an engineering company. But you cannot do engineering jobs, because it's confidential.

I understand that, but I think many of applicants would expect to do some engineering jobs at Lam Research.

Advice to Senior Management

The management at Lam Research has horizontal structure, which makes employees feel free to voice their opinion. I think most of employees like that.

Pros

Lots of pottential for growth. Interesting problems to solve constantly. Good benefits. Lots of travel if you like to. Good coworkers.

Cons

High stress environment. Lots of fast paced projects and programs. Sometimes work/life balance is impacted. Highly demanding work enviroment at Lam.

Advice to Senior Management

A little more profit sharing would always be welcome :-) Some effort to control the workload so that people can have more sustainable work balance.

Pros

One of the best business process setups in the industry
Decent salary, good bonus potential, great benefits
Good opportunity for education and professional growth
Industry leader in the etch market

Cons

Terrible life-work balance
Enormously political environment where toadyism abounds
Telling it like it is is not encouraged
Poor exposure outside their core expertise - ultimately will limit their market potential
Their strength in business processes has led to a dangerous inflexibility to change with the industry

Advice to Senior Management

Remember that you are only as good as the people you have working for you and the environment you encourage. It frequently appears that people only work hard enough there to keep their job because the culture has become poisoned. Encourage better life-work balance.

Pros

pay and benefits
competent top executive team (and next level mostly)

Cons

lack of opportunities in some areas, conversely opportunities for advancement are better in areas such as finance, etc..
politics/group-think in some groups
experience will mainly depend on your manager - there is a very wide range in competence and people skills. there are some well respected, competent, high integrity managers who are the key to survival, conversely there are unbelievably horrible ones at high levels too

Pros

Very customer-focused. Top leadership is extremely strong, perhaps the best in the industry. Opportunities for rapid promotion in title. Highly technical and data driven environment. Very little politics. Nice profit-sharing program.

Cons

Lam does not have enough employees, so the workload per employee is very high. Long work hours--including frequent weekends--are the norm. For some employees, frequent and unpredictable travel.

Advice to Senior Management

Increase compensation to reward the hard work that employees are putting in. Hire more people to allow current employees a better work-life balance. Increase the number of company-sponsored events.

Pros

Pay is above average in the industry though not the best. Good benefits.
Good plasma ecthing technology, this is somethink one would like dispite too many cons.

Cons

-Primarily Single product company, possibly sink in case competitor innovate.
-Highly political environment, you spent more time watchin back than doing engineering work.
-Process/product engineering job hijacks life and significantly impact work life balance.
-Good work is rarely appriciated unless you are in close political circle.
-To many middle managers ( Sr engineers manageing Sr engineers!!) doesnt let clear vision go to engineers level.
-

Advice to Senior Management

good engineer is not always a good manager, consider this during promotions.
Though senior leadership is extremely smart , yet not effective because of middle man ( middle manager)

Pros

Lam Research is in a great position, has a clear technology leadership, and has competent senior management that knows the industry

Cons

Hands-off approach to career advancement (depending on manager) and can be long working hours if you are in a heavily technical role

Advice to Senior Management

Better analyze the value of employees by taking the complete activities of the employees into account. Matrixed environment can conceal real contributors.