Xilinx Reviews

Pros

Good work, decent pay , lots of opportunities to learn

Cons

Poor and inexperienced mangement, lot of communication gap

Advice to Senior Management

Inexperienced managers with micromangement attitude may cause downfall of otherwise brilliant company, top mangement should be tough enough to perform weeding.

Pros

Good people, promising outlook, stock should do well long term, good pay & benefits, fine if you like a group think & decision making

Cons

job related innovation and big ideas are slightly hindered by fear. Difficult to bring about change. lack discipline re: planning & execution, too many meetings & too much discussion - it's cultural.

Advice to Senior Management

Empower your people. C-suite is strong - director level much weaker - very poor advanced planning. Xilinx has an excellent training program, however it falls short because the learning is not implemented from top and pushed through the organization.

Pros

Before we pressed Ctrl-Alt-Delete on our Senior Management team, Xilinx was complacent and drifting. We had many fiefdoms and overlapping functional groups, an oscillating and ever-expanding product direction, and hundreds of employees at all levels who were on "cruise control." Our competition was eating our lunch,

Difficult and painful as it was, we have rid ourselves of the business-as-usual contingent within the organization. Our new management team comes from all over the Semiconductor space, including ASICs, GPUs, and EDA. They have proven that they are more than capable of picking up on the unique challenges of the programmable business - our leadership at 28nm is a testament to this fact.

Our previous CEO was cashing in multi-million dollar option grants on a regular basis. What did he care? In contrast, our new CEO and his team are hungry for success just like the rest of us. Our new product direction and goals are aggressive yet at the same time sensible and attainable. Our customers are picking up on our new-found mojo and recognizing us as technical leaders again.

I'm tired of all the whining about how Xilinx is no longer a "happy place to work." Yes, we used to score very high on those fluffy surveys, but frankly I don't want to work for a company where "everybody wins." This industry is competitive. Non-performers must be replaced by performers. We have streamlined and re-invented the company, and we are now scoring high on technical leadership, innovation, execution, and profitability, not warm and fuzzy employee happiness surveys.

 I'm very excited about the future of Xilinx.

Cons

I think there is a limit to how successful we can be. We are worth 7-8 billion now. If we execute, maybe we'll be worth 12-15 billion. That of course would be great for all of us stock holders, but then what? Unless we make a revolutionary breakthrough, the programmable logic market will remain a niche.

Also, we've hired so many talented people that now it is hard to reward them all. That's the downside of grading on a curve. The economic downturn has helped us recruit and retain top talent, but if that changes, then what?

Advice to Senior Management

Just keep doing what you're doing. Focus on execution but make sure we save a little budget for innovation.

And please, don't take this off-shoring thing too far. Some is good, but too much could be disastrous.

Pros

much more accountability (now)
wide ranging opportunities, if you're interested
Strong technology management

Cons

Pay for Performance (I think changes had to be made and this is always going to be a tough one, but pay for performance system may need slight rework)

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to execute

Pros

There are still a lot of bright and talented engineers and employees, and communication between individual contributors and collaboration is still pretty good. Flexible hours are allowed in most engineering groups. Benefits are OK, salary is OK.

Cons

Xilinx used to be a place that everyone was proud to work. Wim was a charismatic leader, who made a lot of crucial and successful business decisions, and was a true leader that the employees believed in. Moshe came on board, hired some really poor people to support him who really don't seem to understand the core-competence of the Xilinx's products or the importance of keeping the core knowledge of the innovative and creative engineers who were around before them.

The bottom line is the new bottom line. Every decision is now made for maximizing short-term profitability at the expense of what appears to be the long-term health of the company. Excellent, talented, and very experienced engineers are constantly being let go from North America and Europe, and their jobs are being replaced in India and Singapore (usually in the name of being cost-efficient). It seems to be working in the short term to boost margins, but the long-term fate is extremely questionable at best.

Advice to Senior Management

The Board should replace Moshe with someone who understands the industry, and who is a charismatic leader.

Pros

Good work life balance, very respectful colleagues, good team environment

Cons

Now, too many layoffs, clueless upper management with no understanding of FPGAs,
product positioning or the market and no vision. You cannot cut your way to growth.
Lose this management and start over.

Advice to Senior Management

Please leave.

Pros

Co-workers are good to work with and have for the most part been team players.
We get to build a good product that I think still has great potential.

Cons

New goal system actually discourages teamwork. While it is intended to motivate you to meet your goals, the side effect is that helping others might lower your place on the curve. This would lead to less chances for raises and bonuses.

Top level management is out of touch with their employees. Xilinx used to be consistently one of the top ten companies to work for, now it doesn't even make the list. The attitude from the top seems to be one of little respect for the employees, their experience or skills. It seems the employees are considered easily interchangeable resources.

Advice to Senior Management

Stock value should not be the only consideration in how to run a company. Communicate more openly and honestly with the employees.

Pros

xilinx was a great company to work for , the work place was nice, my co worker was one of the best people I work with in many years.

Cons

don't have too much to said about downsides of working at Xilinx. Work load was a little much
in the pass few years, but it was ok.

Pros

Work and family life balance, growth opportunities

Cons

Senior management is not upto the mark and recognition is not very satisfactory

Advice to Senior Management

Be empathetic towards employees concerns

Pros

- Salary and benefits are good.
- There are some very good technical people around to learn from.
- Interesting technology with real potential.
- You are given a lot of latitude to organize your work and time as you see fit.

Cons

- The senior management team is very weak. Some are self-obsessed to the point of clinical narcissism.
- Teamwork between employees and between teams is now very poor. This aspect has degraded significantly since the new management regime moved in.
- Excessive (and increasing) cronyism and politics.
- Very long hours with little recognition or opportunity to progress based on doing your job well.

Advice to Senior Management

You must start listening to employees and customers. Act on the feedback from the employee survey. Judging by the comments made here and the CEO approval rating, it seems that some urgent action is needed.