AMD Reviews

Once upon a time I was a very enthusiastic engineer until I spent a few years working for AMD. Working at AMD will destroy you, things here are done terrible, starting for upper management all the way down to engineer level. There is a lot of politics, a lot of management decisions are taken without even considering or asking engineers about the technical side. Most of the teams are very bad, managers have ZERO management skills, everyone knows that things are wrong but at the same time, they know that things wont change. There is an unbelievable LACK of responsibility and ownership. All the time the projects are behind, there is no clear schedules, a lot of cross-site work with Shanghai, India and multiple sites in US, decision making is very slow. People is not recognize for your work, unless you are very very friend of your boss, they will recognize it, because managers are SO SO BAD, that they dont even know what their employees are doing. In summary, this is a nightmare, please stay away from AMD if you can, if you are already working for AMD, wake up! and switch to another company before it is too late.

1. Overtime is expected and is considered normal (60+ hours per week). Get prepared to give up most of your evenings, weekends and holidays. Note that this does not mean your efforts will be appreciated or that you will advance in your career faster. Some senior employees even work through vacation days. 2. Management does not care about employees. Constantly looking to make employees work through weekends, christmas break etc. with no additional pay or days back in lieu. Middle management blames senior management by saying these are requests cascaded from the top. 3. Pay is the lowest in the industry. Competition (Intel/NVIDIA) pays significantly higher. For example, the base salary of a new grad at Intel is more than a senior engineer at AMD. 4. Look out for "recharge days" through out the year. These recharge days come directly out of your vacation days. Sometimes a recharge day might fall on a friday which you take off and burn a vacation day, and then you might be expected to come in on the saturday to work. You do not get any additional pay or a day off in lieu for coming on a saturday. 5. You'll notice that a lot of junior employees/new grads have lead positions. This is management trying to squeeze as much juice as possible while paying the lowest possible salaries. 6. Some teams can be cliquey. Some managers fraternize with some direct reports ( hanging out constantly outside of work ) which is completely unprofessional and leads to favouritism. If you're not part of this inner circle, you get passed over for promotions or higher raises. 7. Female CEO but women face constant sexism. Women coming back from maternity leave lose their progress in advancing to the next level. Women taking their full maternity leave entitlement get shamed/talked about behind their back (as if maternity leave is a vacation). In the last women's day event held by the company, the guest speakers included caucasian male executives which many women raised as distasteful. 8. High turnover of experienced employees over the past year.