Novellus Reviews in Portland, OR Area

Pros

The field is the place to be with compressed work week. Better pay now that we are hourly. New products are sometimes leading edge.

Cons

Benefits have been going down hill. New products are often not ready when presented to the customers. Too much focus on some failed products.

Advice to Senior Management

The people make you a success and you should remember to look down the ladder once in a while instead of just up.

Pros

Good Benefits, lots of opportunity to gain additional knowledge and career growth.

Cons

Long work hours, company runs very lean

Pros

Novellus is the leader in its field. Many employers at Novellus are well known and respected academically and professionally. Novellus encourages innovation, patents, and publications from its employers.

Cons

Working at Novellus can be hard sometimes, which provides a challenge for balancing work and personal life. Stress also creeps in to the work placeas deadlines have to be meant.

Pros

Compressed work week is great.
For not having a degree, the pay is not bad.
Medical benefits are pretty good.
Profit sharing is nice when it happens.

Cons

Multiple medical insurance cost increases over the last few years. Elimination of HMO option.
Stock purchase plan was cut a few years ago.
Car allowance was cut a couple of years ago.
Slow to promote and give raises.

Because of the above items, after 7 years with the company, my take home pay is now less than it was when I started. Then factor in inflation, the cost of gas, etc and I'm worse off than when I started with the company...

Advice to Senior Management

Spend a few extra dollars to take care of your employees - And I mean more than a lame team activity once a quarter, or pizza at company meetings, those don't carry much weight with us. We know you have plenty of cash in the bank and it wouldn't take much to make us happy. We see how many stock options the senior management get and how much they sell them for - and that only serves to anger us further.

I don't know about other departments, but Field Service is on the verge of revolt, moral is in the dump and you can bet that as soon as the economy picks up, many of us will be moving on to other companies. Some of us are actively looking right now and have promising leads...

Bring back the car allowance and stock purchase plan - some of your competitors still offer them and it would go a long way toward bridging the gap that has been created.

Give out some promotions and raises of more than 1 - 2 % every other year.

Pros

Very interesting and complex mechanical engineering/design ProE CAD work on their products. Their systems are large semiconductor capital equipment, so there is a variety of systems that an engineer works on or is exposed to.

Cons

Ridiculous schedule demands, requiring long hours, that must be might which sacrifices your personal life time. Even though you are a salary employee, Novellus does not support comp time off for the extra hours you put in. The company runs lean, so there are usually no additional resources to support an extremely aggressive schedule; therefore it is generally left up to one individual to meet these goals.

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

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

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

- if you can survive here, you can survive anywhere
- your peers are awesome and will be there to support you
- very fast paced

Cons

- Semiconductor capital equipment industry is extremely cyclical, and the ebb and flow of the business will affect your job workload
- long hours and little appreciation from your superiors
- high turnover rate
- nepotism

Advice to Senior Management

- take advantage of the talent and enthusiasm of some of your employees; empower them and let them do their thing! there's so much untapped potential here...
- come into the 21st century please... management style is still very old school
- competitive salaries would be nice