Applied Materials Reviews

Former Employee – worked at Applied Materials full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – Customer-focused thinking in a sector of relentless change

Cons – Culture is of keeping you doing what you have been good at doing. No notion of growth out side the box.

Advice to Senior Management – Promote unconstrained thinking that is truly outside your comfort zone.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Applied Materials full-time for more than 8 years

Pros – Equal opportunity for all
High on mutual trust and respect
Very high on integrity and ethics

Cons – Highly US centric
Limited local Autonomy
Very low Customer base in. India

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

Former Employee – worked at Applied Materials full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – Decent compensation. Decent benefits. Leadership position in the industry.

Cons – Management by crisis, Fire-fighting rewarded. Complex environment. Less focus on long term vision.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Applied Materials full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – Good people working there and good people working in the past. Many have moved to our competition.

Cons – Poor management. Lost direction of our core focus as a company.

Advice to Senior Management – Outsourcing our talent/creativity for the sake of a quick buck kills out ability to innovate in the future and release truly world-class products. Mike needs to move on. He has been a failure.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Applied Materials full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – Great people, very good benefits, used to have good training programs.

Cons – The culture of the 90's and early 00's is long gone. Solar was a total waste of time, talent, and capital.

The stock hasn't budged in 10 years, stock buy back - fail, dividend - fail, cash from $8B to $2B. What a train wreck.

Advice to Senior Management – Mike needs to go. The company needs to focus on the core business again, just like what Jim did back in the day.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Applied Materials full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – * Estimates are respected. Good work life balance (at least as of 2010 it existed)
* Work From Home facility and flexible working hours
* Opportunities to interact with colleagues/customers from multiple geographical locations

Cons – * Frankly not a company for Software Engineers. Software divisions are very neglected in the company. From pay, bonuses to team outings, Software Engineers (and also Software Engineering managers) are treated like 2nd grade citizens.
 * Very poor growth: One level-up costs you many years. Change only in designation, literally no change in role. Applied Materials recruited high-calibre people (people from premier instituties like IIT, BITS, NITs etc) during 2005, 2006 and 2007 for it's Automation Products division. In a matter for few years, all (I repeat, all) of them left the company for the same reason: lack of growth.
* Poor pay compared to rest of the software industry. We were always told that "Applied Materials is a very good payer, we stand at 90% percentile..." - but unfortunately that statement was made based on comparison with just a few other companies that constitute only a very small fraction of already-small semi-conductor industry.

Advice to Senior Management – * If you ever think software is an integral part of your company, pay some attention to software divisions.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Applied Materials full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – Money was good for the educational level if you're in the right position. Progressive industry that has a bright future if it doesn't ALL go overseas.

Cons – Doesn't really matter how hard you work or what your contributions are, you're either 'One Of The Boys' or you're not. Lower level managers are TERRIBLE about taking care of their buddies while disregarding the real performers. Upper management either doesn't know about this or more likely they don't care. Very little work / life balance. They basically feel like they own you. Benefits get whittled away little by little over time.

Advice to Senior Management – You constantly talk about rewarding the doers but there is no fairness in the performance reviews. Applied review system has been broken for many many years and you can't just disguise this with with catchy new words. The doers are not being rewarded, the managers buddies are first.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Applied Materials

Pros – Money is decent even if performance is mediocre; good networking opportunities; very involved in community service

Cons – getting mindshare for creative ideas that are not part of the "Applied way" is extremely difficult, and impossible if customers are not one of the top 3-5 in the industry

Advice to Senior Management – Be more aggressive in going after multiple levels of business/customers; don't let bureaucratic processes prevent good business from coming in

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Applied Materials

Pros – Good people, it's good if you like fixing things

Cons – Poorly managed. Laid back work environment

Current Employee – been working at Applied Materials for more than a year

Pros – Excellent compensation & benefits, challenging work environment. Management does a good job of avoiding layoffs during down time

Cons – Economic ups & downs of the silicon industry. Work environment can be very demanding. Lots of travel for customer facing positions.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend