Western Digital Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Western Digital full-time

Pros – The company is in a Stable financial situation currently. The co-workers are enjoyable to work with but that would probably be the case at any job. The location of the Irvine office is in a nice and safe area.

Cons – Employees are treated as commodities by upper management where all are considered to have the same skill level and talent. There are no real employee perks. The medical benefis are very poor. The on-site cafeteria is light on selection and a ripoff.

Advice to Senior Management – Enhance work environment to ensure continued success of company. WD is competing with other companies that offer better work environments and better job satisfaction.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Western Digital full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Great work environment, nice friendly people, fair pay.

Cons – Like every big company, internal politics is a given.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Western Digital

Pros – People around are friendly and caring about you.

Cons – No specific tasks to work on as an intern.

Current Employee – been working at Western Digital full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Very good benefits that offsets the below industry average pay. Financially, the company is doing very well and they are dominating that industry.

Cons – There is too much of internal politics going on, plus the work (the firmware) is not interesting and challenging. The people who excel in the company are the ones that thrive on operational and manufacturing challenges.

Advice to Senior Management – Most of the management need to take some training in management practices and communication skills.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Western Digital full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Good work atmosphere. Challenging projects.

Cons – No free food. No perks...at all. Water is filtered tap. Coffee is horrible Farmer Brothers junk. It's taboo to talk about raises and promotions. You will rarely get a raise or even hear about a promotion. You have to force your boss to give you one. Most bosses are too scared to even help you out. There are few good managers that will actually look out for you. There is a lot of dead weight at the company. For every great engineer there are two mediocre engineers. Workloads do not match the pay. Testing teams get paid roughly the same as firmware engineers, but they do half the work. Currently, there is an exodus at the company as many of the top engineers are leaving to companies that reward them better for their skills (better pay).

Advice to Senior Management – Reward your top engineers. Instead of hiring many engineers, hire fewer but better engineers. Have some perks for your employees. The colors and break rooms are depressing.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Western Digital full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – Moderate job security, camaraderie among peers, flexible hours.

Cons – high stress environment, somewhat cramped work areas.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Western Digital full-time for less than a year

Pros – I love working with these engineers. They are some of the smartest, most capable, and hardest working people I have met. I'm always encouraged to do my best, and there are always people around to bounce ideas off of. There's hardly any red tape - very fast-paced industry!

Cons – Pay is not in the highest percentile of companies.

The work is so fast-paced that sometimes we get ahead of ourselves - making changes to future builds before we know the results of current experiments.

Advice to Senior Management – I understand that time to market is very important, but sometimes we're tripping over ourselves getting things done extremely quickly.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Western Digital full-time for more than 8 years

Pros – There are no reasons to work for WD- Just a pay check

Cons – Solid state is taking over

Advice to Senior Management – All are after money- milking until the solid state takes over.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Western Digital full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Very efficient, total pay is very good

Cons – Very silo based, very competitive internally , no teamwork

Advice to Senior Management – Modernize

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Western Digital full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – - Decent salary
- Good bonuses, especially now that stocks are high
- Commute against traffic

Cons – - Terrible medical insurance: only one choice and huge deductible
- You won't be able to take a vacation when you want. For the first four years you will have only 13 vacation days per year and the company has a mandatory shutdown the week of 7/4 and the week from Xmas to new year. Certain years they also had shutdown on Thanksgiving week.
- The company is incredibly cheap. They try to save money on the most stupid things. For example cleaning people empty your wastebasket only once a week; if it is full or it smells you are expected to empty it yourself into one of the few bins that are emptied daily. Another example is the farewell party of the previous CEO (held last December): all the employees were offered was one cookie and one small bottle of water. The HR people were there making sure that you didn't take more than one cookie. You can figure out the atmosphere.
- Little job security: in 2014 the company will probably merge with HGST. It is reasonable to think that at that time about 30% of the workforce will be laid off
- Intimidating working condition: almost every day you are supposed to proof yourself and justify your existence in the company

Advice to Senior Management – Screwing people won't make the company more successful

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company