Qimonda * Reviews

Pros

Often call the "country club" of semiconductor companies, there was a reasonable work-life balance emphasis, but this often became an accountability issue.

Cons

There were many issues with communication, from senior mgt not being realistic and section managers not passing down information to their reports. Also, there was problem with letting people do their work. Too much emphasis was put on giving updates to managers so they could pass them on to their managers and so on instead of letting engineers represent themselves and their work. Also, there was not much recognition of accomplishments in relation to pointing out of negatives. There should have been more celebrations of success, especially with departments. One more thing, training and knowledge sharing should be important, but wasn't at Qimonda. There were too many people flying by the seat of their pants without real training, leading to mediocre results.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more truthful to your employees.

Pros

The working environment is good, and the technologies are in leading position.

Cons

Career advancement is too slow and not transparent.

Advice to Senior Management

The career advancement, promotion and some jobs related issues are not transparent. The decision by management is a bit slow, not sensitive and not transparent.
The decision making is slow and not transparent due to too many levels of management who didn't build up the trust and didn't know exactly the real situation locally.
The feedback from employees and local experts did not treated seriously when making important decision.

Pros

The company was a great place to work for those who had a family. Middle management was very competent. Work hours extremely flexible providing you also met your deadlines. Overall it was a very healthy and respectful environment.

Cons

The only complaint I have is unfortunately the only one that matters in this case....Senior Management. A couple of years ago when Qimonda spun off from Infineon, We experienced changes at the executive level. They preached about being fast and responsive, but it turns out that what killed us was that we were still slow and unresponsive. The changing market conditions in the DRAM industry were harsh during this cycle and we went from a position of power to bankruptcy in 18 months.

Advice to Senior Management

My only advice is that this soon to be exCEO should find a position where he doesn't have the chance to influence so many people in such a negative way. A lot of lives were disrupted in the case :(

Pros

Good Work/Life balance. However, this partly depends on your manager. My section manager was very reasonable and treated engineers as professionals and provided flexibility.

Cons

Some aspects are overly structured lacking flexibility. Very poor structured approach to information sharing for process owners and training of new engineers. Essentially, a bare minimum and then learn as you go. It eventually works itself out, but with the high rate of movement with the company it creates significant inefficiencies. Oh yea, and company is now bankrupt. Bankrupcy and mass layoffs despite meeting/exceeding target objectives.

Advice to Senior Management

Present a target that would at the very least keep people employed, regardless of how difficult. Don't create a target that leads to mass layoffs regardless of it is met or not. This leads to a lack of trust within the organization leading to poor morale and inevitable talent drain.

Pros

it used to be a place where technology was up to par with competitors; ability to work with colleagues on 3 continents make work very challenging and interesting

Cons

company is oging out of business; management issues lacking clear goals that are followed through added to overall economic situation

Advice to Senior Management

don't change priorities every 4-6 months; don't just re-arrange management if things go wrong but also exchange some of the lower performing management personal

Pros

The question is, "Why was it the best reason" because the factory is closing down. I loved the company because it was initially all about the people and developing the people. With the growth of the people, you had the growth of the company.

Cons

In the last few years, the mindset of the company changed and was just dishonest to their employees. A week before the company shut the doors, they told all of us not to worry because it would be OK. Actually, it was less than a week; the "OK" meeting was Wednesday and the following Tuesday was the punch in the gut.

Advice to Senior Management

I realize it was a tough position to be in but honesty goes along way. Putting your faith in the people can get you a long way. This was the downfall of the company as the faith and trust started to decline a few years ago.

Pros

Decent pay. If you were in the right group it was heaven.

Cons

Minimal training: Survival of the fittest. Silo thinking, no leadership from management. People not wanting to take responsibility for their processes. Engineers get hostile when you suggest their is a problem with their processes, yet, when proven to them that their processes were at issue, they quickly tried to act like it was no big deal eventhough wafers had to be scrapped.

Advice to Senior Management

Too late for feedback. The ship is sunk. I will state that my observation of management left me very dissapointed. I was not impressed. I saw a senior level manager lose emotional control.

Pros

The company provides an excellent vacation policy and benefits package. Pay is above average. The company had great training policies in the beginning. The cafe was good before it was closed. The free coffee was great before they shut it down. The $1500 chairs were comfortable even though we had to share cubes while vacant cubes took up 2/3 of the site.

Cons

The corporate management is criminal. They lie to employees and have cheated over a thousand people out of their pay using a strategic bankruptcy. They hired 200 employees in order to get them to sign away their severance packages then fired them and declared bankruptcy. They told another 500 employees that their severence packages would be delayed then declared bankruptcy after the payments were 2 weeks over due causing a large number of employees to lose their homes.

Advice to Senior Management

Go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect your severance

Pros

1. Nothing much to do for the time being. 2. Can use office hours and equipment to browse for new job opportunities, prepare and send CVs, attend external and phone interviews. 3. Can visit children during office hours as they are only at downstairs. 4. Still can attend some internal courses to prepare ourselves for challenges outside. 5. Can use office hours for extended lunches, run errands like visting banks and government offices, for swimming session at a pool nearby. Can hang on to the job until receive a golden handshake, which I hope soon, in view of the recent insolvency announcement.

Cons

1. No pay increment last year. 2. Probably no pay increments this year. 3. Golden handshake probably not attractive for those who are not senior enough with the company. 4. Risk of not even getting a golden handshake if company simply shut down. 5. They no longer fly me around for trivial meetings. 6. Qimonda is slow in everything, planning to implementation, slow is something that a DRAM company cannot afford. 7. Management (VP and above) is still not announcing any pay cuts for themselves to save the prolong the company's life. I still see expats working in Singapore office, but they cheap or simply not dispensable.

Advice to Senior Management

Trim down on non-crucial functions. By non-crucial, I mean you can still get orders, make, ship and collect payments from customers, without them

Pros

Qimonda is very conveniently located next to air port. I like the environment. I also like Richmond. It's a quiet city, where people are friendly and more focused on making friends.

Cons

Excessive meetings. Too many top-down decisions. Priorities seem to shift constantly. Staff level managers seem to give directives without sound engineering analysis.

Advice to Senior Management

Let engineering do the engineering work instead of attending meetings. If engineering spend over 50% of its time in meeting, then when is time to do some work. Many managers seem to be working just to go from one meeting to another.