Novellus Reviews

Pros

Reasonable pay
Traditional benefits though I don't know if that is still true,
Year end bonus if company exceeded goals.

Cons

Engineering and management are employees, most others are contractors that aren't eligible for benefits or bonus. Absolutely no consideration for work life balance. They demanded 60 hours/week for 8 or 9 weeks out of every 13 week production cycle. There were constant layoffs and hiring, you could never feel secure. Rick Hill has disdain for operating in the USA. He has said in interviews he wants to move operations overseas.

Advice to Senior Management

Novellus should be bought out by another company.

Pros

Novellus offers plenty of room for growth if you have the desire to move up.

Cons

Manufacturing work long hours and days.
Management is slow to recognize and promote talented employees, many top talent end up leaving.

Advice to Senior Management

Try harder to recognize and compensate top talent fairly so that they will stay at Novellus.

Pros

location is great, compensations is great, good work environment, support for family due to locational advantage (san jose, CA), good cheap transport connections, affordable housing and good city life

Cons

communication with management is limited, feedback doesnt seem to be good enough, work-environment can sometimes be stressful and finally, there are better paying similar companies around

Advice to Senior Management

need to either improve the work environment and interpersonal relationships between the workforce to make it less stressful, or compensate by way of higher pay. Need to improve feedback

Pros

Good place to work as long as you have the communication channel established with the management team specifically if you are not in the office.

Cons

Bad place to work if you do not have the communication channel established with the management team specifically if you are not in the office.

Pros

Its a pay check
Health benifits

Cons

Zero respect for you as an individual or your family. This company could care less about you or your family. Work more, get less. Verbal abuse by the customer is fine by management. Management will NOT back you up and will stomp on you along with the customer. Management will smile at you while stabbing you in the back. Management tells you one thing, then does the opposite and get this!! ITS ALL YOUR FAULT. Management expects they can call you on your personal phone and demand you drop your family to come into work any time day or night. You will get laid off with ZERO warning, lose your house and health benefits and have to file for bankruptcy. Everything about working for NVLS is a down side at this point, even in this economy. Ive never ever seen so many unhappy employees!!! Management will never ever get it and they will never ever care. SAD!!!

Advice to Senior Management

Care about your people and they will take care of you. Crap on them as you have been for years now and see where its gonna get you!!! Hopefully laid off and bankrupt

Pros

the location is good for semiconductor process engineer.

Cons

unprofessional management and not career development

Pros

coopeative mood with interdepartment work, flexible

Cons

job assignment is not clear sometimes

Advice to Senior Management

business planning

Pros

Good workforce (all are young engineers) and apart from that you may get good salary in Mechanical Industry.

Cons

management is worst at it best and this company is not meant for hard work resources. If your good at bucketing then you needn't to work but you'll be benefited more than anybody else.

Advice to Senior Management

Please avoid favoritism and it will not help in long run.

Pros

You have a good paying job now when others are looking for a job in a market that is very unforgiving and not offering options.
You have a way of providing health coverage for your wife and children, poor (comparing to what it used to be) but better than not being covered.
A good way to maintain the financial ship floating until the storm passes by.

Cons

No career development path in sight. There are lateral possibilities but these are tempting only for those interested in titles or traveling.
Employees are required to travel with very short notice, drop their life at any time they might be needed to satisfy the company targets, commitments or contracts. This is also dependent on the manager’s ego or desire to be promoted and be well seen from above.
Beside the tough family life one has when working a compressed week schedule, there is no respect for big efforts employees make to maintain the service the company should provide to its clients. No consideration for the ones that work overtime.
As most of the semiconductor companies, Novellus had the habit of hiring when times are good and laying off personnel when times are tough but now it is harder than in the past to deal with these ups and downs of the industry. All the weight and pressure gets pushed directly to field service, especially the administration overhead that always finds ways to avoid layoffs and reorganization.
Compared to other similar companies, Novellus used to be a better place to be years ago.
Now is at the bottom, with most of the other companies offering a better alternative for the same job.
As a Field Engineer now, you have no right to time off, and if you really must have it for legal reasons, it won’t be when needed, not in one piece and certainly not for your needs, time off is used to reduce the expenses when the books are not looking good.
Preferential treatment is a staple of this region with managers made through a boot camp that teaches them only to delegate.
Novellus used to have good health benefits, not anymore.
Compliance appearance is the main concern of the management, we need to look like we are safe, we need to look like we care and that we offer a good working environment.

Advice to Senior Management

When your employees are working every day of the week and the next week and the next one, and this goes on for months, you need to hire more people. How long can you overwork a team until you burn them out? You will find the answer.
Your salary comes from the money Field Service generates. Moving people around and telling them they won’t get a raise is not management. There is more than that to it.

Pros

Good balance of work and life
Relatively good compensation and benefits
Company size is big enough to transfer between different divisions

Cons

No or less communications between peers
frequent layoffs due to industry cycles or economy
Less communication between managers and team members

Advice to Senior Management

Improve the communications between employees, departments, divisions.
Do not outsource too many jobs to overseas
Use new technologies for hardware and software