Spansion Reviews in Austin, TX Area

Pros

Good people to work with, great campus in Austin.

Cons

Limited in technology applications. There only so much you can do with NOR flash.

Advice to Senior Management

Diversify

Pros

Spansion has gone through a very difficult transition. It all started with the 2009 financial crash and led to firing of almost all the senior management, restructuring, selling extra facilities, bankruptcy then re-emergence. This has all been a positive path and was critical for Spansion in order to be as successful as it is becoming. New executive management is competent and driven to succeed. In most cases you will not be micro-managed at this company. This is good if you already have experience in the field and are a self starter. Pay is good and bonus plans are fair. Work/life balance is good. People at Spansion really do care and there exists a reasonable level of comradely and teamwork.

Cons

Understand the history of Spansion as AMD, AMD spinoff, and then bankruptcy then new company. There are alot of legacy AMD people/ideas that carry them down with excesses baggage and bad habits form the past. Be aware: In most cases you will not be managed very closely at this company. Often times more management interaction and leadership is needed for people that require more guidance. Senior talent that is not used appropriately, to much focus on the “past” and how the “good old AMD” days used to be. Leadership is needed to get people past that.

Advice to Senior Management

At Spansion there are lots of very talented resources. Not always clear concise direction on how to use those resources to better help the company. Tend to leave people alone and allow them to function at the comfort level they have managed to create around them. In some way this is de-motivating for some of those people and the people that see it. Work harder to create a more unified culture between Sunnyvale and Austin.

Pros

I loved the people I worked with at Spansion. They tended to be very bright and hard working problem solvers. Spansion permitted its employees to take calculated risks within the manufacturing environment. For instance, we were permitted to continuously refine our processes, introduce new consumables, and collaborate with vendors. Had its business model not been horribly flawed I would have liked to work there my entire life.

Cons

Spansion's economic model was flawed. For a very long time, AMD and Intel were locked into a price war in flash memory that caused both companies to sell below cost year after year. For Intel, this was a calculated, logical approach. 90% of its revenue came from the highly profitable CPU segment and only 10% from Flash. AMD was split 50/50. By creating severe pricing problems in the NOR flash market, Intel could hamper AMD's growth. When AMD jettisoned the flash business as its own company, Spansion - that was an important step to reducing excessive competitive rivalry. For several years, Spansion operated independently losing $75 to $150 M. Eventually Intel management tired of trying to destroy Spansion and destroying enormous value for its shareholders. I had hoped that when Intel and ST Microelectronics finally spun off and merged their NOR businesses (Numonyx) that there would be finally much needed peace and reasonable pricing. Yet this never came to fruition. Neither company's leadership made any moves to wave the white flag and so both companies continue to suffer. To Intel's credit, many years ago the company attempted to raise all flash prices by 15%. To AMD's discredit, they maintained their artificially low prices. Had I been running the company, I would have thanked Intel by raising our flash prices by 17 or 18% to make the NOR industry more attractive.

Another major factor in Spansion's decline was the NAND flash glut. I read some iSuppli reports indicating that NAND coupled with DRAM could achieve similar performance to NOR at lower cost. iSuppli predicted that NOR would continue to lose market share for mobile phone to NAND. The mobile phone manufacturers constantly put pressure on NOR providers to lower costs. I can't understand how sales would tolerate reservation pricing 15% below cost but they seemed to do it year after year. Another report I read indicated software was a major barrier to entry for NAND. Unfortunately, I never had access to the upper echelons of sales and strategy at Spansion - I would have loved to understand the rationale for their business thinking. In the end, I believe Spansion and Numonyx have both capitulated declaring they don't want to supply mobile phone makers anymore than demanding they pay a reasonable price for these chips is mind-blowing. That is an amazing declaration! To chose to simply refuse business rather than first saying, "Hey, how about you pay cost plus some profit for these parts! Considering I've been subsidizing your profit margin by selling below my total production costs for 5 to 10 years - YOU OWE ME!"

I believe the new Spansion under Kispert's leadership has made the tough, yet inevitable decisions that Management should have made many years ago. Spansion could not afford the high fixed costs of operating a R&D facility in Silicon Valley. The plan to build a tiny 300 mm factory in Japan was a total blunder. If I had been CEO, I would offered a relocation package for the R&D folks to move to Austin and I would have concentrated all production (and only profitable production there). The most dedicated could have left over-priced and bankrupt California, sold their over-priced homes in the central San Jose area, and lived like kings and queens in the low-cost, highly desirable Austin area. All effort should have been focused on exploiting the talent within FAB25 and coming up with creative solutions to boost capacity by eliminating bottlenecks in the factory. The management now has pretty much done what should have been done years ago except now they have eliminated a lot of good engineers and destroyed morale and wiped out $1.2 B in investor cash and confidence. Year after year Spansion was loved by its suppliers - it has received award after award for best supplier including perhaps ironically even several awards from Samsung's mobile phone division which one might assume would naturally favor its own internal semiconductor division. Spansion created considerable value for its customers yet continuously failed to capture that value in profits. I would have made whatever legally permitted gestures to Intel/ST Microelectronics/Numonyx to diffuse the price war and get mobile phone pricing back to reasonable levels. Market share is meaningless if it is achieved unprofitably.

Advice to Senior Management

Rebuild Austin manufacturing. Hire some better negotiators. Get back in the mobile phone business as long as you can negotiate proper pricing (i.e. full cost of chips plus profit). Build chips that can be customized through software rather than 10's of different hardware designs. Require upfront payment for specialty chip design work. Seek out new business opportunities such as biomedical and environmentally sensor chips. Offer a foundry service for the numerous semiconductor startups in Austin offering quicker development turns and tight collaboration. Reinvigorate the EcoRAM initiative based on customer feedback. Most importantly treat your former employees and current ones with the respect they deserve - cutting 3,000 jobs with no severance was obscene. SVTC looks like it is pioneering some interesting new markets - perhaps Spansion could bring particular profitable business in using its very low cost per wafer manufacturing cost. Continue to invest in BIST and other cost savings techniques for packaging and electrical test.

Pros

I can't deny it - I am well-paid.

Cons

Your vacation time is held hostage by market fluctuations in that you are told when you can and cannot take your vacation. A benefit promised to you can be taken away at any time.

Advice to Senior Management

If you're going on a "money-saving" spree, make it worthwhile and lasting. Truly evaluate how many employees are needed to get a job done. In many cases there are far too many do-nothings and hard-working employees are let go to "save money". In truth it would be cheaper to retain 5 hard-workers and let go of 10 "cheaper" workers. Review your HR department. Those with serious management concerns cannot even get their e-mails responded to by HR.

Pros

The culture is hard-driving and meritocratic, where respect for people is a core value. There are many exceedingly talented people there with best-in-class performance in many areas. Manufacturing systems are a particular strength.

Cons

Layoffs and lean hiring since spinning off from AMD and Fujitsu have left a relatively senior workforce--experienced and talented but also somewhat less vibrant than when I arrived. Benefits have been steadily erroded: sabbaticals were reduced several times and then recently eliminated, the old stock options have been replaced with restricted stock (which are all worth less than the taxes paid on them), the stock purchase plan was eliminated and never replaced, counter to promises from senior management (it would have provided the company cash that they so desperately need). The overall NOR flash business is getting smaller--despite generally outworking the competition, believing in a rosy future requires a leap of faith that one of the new, non-NOR efforts will take off, but those efforts have not all been well supported in the most recent cash-preservation-first days.

Advice to Senior Management

There have been several bet-the-company decisions that seem poor. The fact that SP1 was built in Japan, with *zero* government incentives probably killed the company (recent AMD, Samsung, and Intel fabs have all gotten $300M to $1.2B in incentives). The analysis that led to that decision seemed driven more by a desire to make Fujitsu happy in the early days of the spinoff than by sound financial analysis. The engineers at SP1 are generally very good and working very hard, but the SP1 startup has been rocky, and of course it was built a year or 2 too soon. The focus on market share above all else should have been rethought years ago. Blaming the competition for "irrational" pricing when we have gained market share every quarter is foolish. Not raising prices (or stopping the decline) when our factories were full and we were still losing money was foolish. Spending as much money as we did refitting the SDC and then not generating any revenue there was not wise. Our foundry strategy has generally been a disaster: paying TSMC for years and then walking away, teaching SMIC how to compete with us, giving our backend operations away such that we've lost much of the vertical integration and control that we once had. If the new executive team thinks that this is the direction the company should go, I hope that they'll rethink it. Our in-house talent is our best asset--be careful about believing promises that others can do better.

Pros

friendly and helpful co-workers, good work-life balance, amazing place to learn and grow, salary in par in the top companies in semiconductor industry,

Cons

legacy systems and practices, tough market-a shrinking NOR market,falling ASPs,bad financial decisions,slow decision making-(eg)projects getting cancelled just when the project is in the final stages citing poor customer demand for that product. These kind of project cancellations keep happening round the year-an absolute waste of resource and money,placing more emphasis on meeting the unrealistic deadline without ensuring the quality by coming up with a good systems of checks and balances

Advice to Senior Management

get your priorities clear on which projects you want to work,

Pros

The group I worked with was great. The work was usually interesting, and I enjoyed the disappearing "AMD" culture. Generally at the level where work actually gets done, there are a lot of great people.

Cons

They are willing to lay you off without any notice and no severance package, even violating the law. The new CEO, John Kispert, is as incompetent as he is heartless. The layoff stunt in parallel with executive pay increases was a PR nightmare that should never have happened, even just beyond the ethics. They have complete disregard for the welfare of employees. I would never recommend or work for this company again. After all, you could be next.

Advice to Senior Management

Develop some basic human decency.

Pros

In terms of technology, it is at the forefront. So it is a great place to work with a bunch of highly skilled experts advancing and creating products we can be proud of. Colleagues are great too!

Cons

Management sucks. In this latest economic crisis, the management has shown little respect to its dedicated workforce. They laid off 30% of employees and gave themselves a 10% raise the very next day. Not the way to go, dudes!

Advice to Senior Management

Management needs to respect their people.

Pros

Being a mature company, technology company it is a good place to work. Some very nice people work here. It offers great working environment for many reasons as follows. It offers great areas for walking, running, basketball. It has a very good and inexpensive cafeteria. There exit great opportunities for advancement. Pay offered is competitive.

Cons

Poor direction from top and middle management. Hence the direction received is often obscure and changing. Often the wrong goals are set and then they are changed to other wrong goals. Poor performance does not get addressed or good performance is not rewarded.

Advice to Senior Management

1) Hire from outside your comfort circle for senior positions.
2) Create opportunity to get unvarnished feedback and suggestions from lower in the management hierarcy. Involve employees and contractors, since your best talent is hidden from you within the contractors.
3) Cut a few layers of middle management. They obscure the picture for you and for the employees.

Pros

Work enviornment here is quite friendly and stress level is reasonable. Good work/life balance. Most people are working reasonably hard.

Cons

- Semiconductor as a whole is a sunset business in north America
- Memory market is very brutal and it is not for fainted heart
- Some cultural residue left from AMD - execution is slow and unreliable
- Upside on salary and career is very limited

Advice to Senior Management

- Focus on execution and commitment
- Plan for long term success
- Diversify your product portfolio
- Cultivate your culture and identity to make you stand out from others