Maxis Communications Employee Reviews & Ratings

slow paced at times due to amount of red tape

- There are sooooo many useless people that don't care about their job, but management never disciplines them or fires them - A lot of "old guard" that have let their skills run completely out of date but have decided they will continue to ride the gravy train to retirement - There is something seriously wrong with the way the entire QA process. You can see it in forums that AMD notoriously releases buggy chipset firmware, driver software, etc with issues that should've easily been caught by QA. - Often times projects that you work on will get axed for no apparent reason, leaving you with months and months of effort that is never used for anything - It's difficult not to notice the insane gender imbalance. I get the tech industry as a whole has this issue, but there were less than a dozen women on a floor with several hundred guys. It's 2019, people...

Many people only knows intel and not AMD

-The company is a mess. Upper management is there just to collect the $ and have no real intention to turn around the company (for starters, google "AMD Rasgon bonuses" and click on the Yahooo article) -Employees are treated like idiots. We are promised a never-ending list of things that are oh-just-around-the-corner and never happen: more share in emerging markets, the emergence of a semi-custom business (fancy way to describe two game console wins), gaining market share back from NVIDIA (according to Lisa Su in 2014 "there is no reason why AMD's graphics share should not be 50%", it now stands below 30%), and so on. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me (and then I leave) -Constant layoffs plus attrition = scarce engineering talent. It is very difficult for AMD to come up with good products considering the amount of good people who left, and the fact that they have been replaced by so-so engineers since top talent will land elsewhere -Morale is low. The parking lot is almost empty by 6.30pm. You meet strangers and five minutes they are openly making fun of the company. The ex-CEO is laid off and given $5M in cash but people do not see any salary raise when they are promoted. -As the result of all of the above, AMD's technology understandably is way behind, which results on a death spiral: less revenues -> more losses -> more layoffs -> products are delayed -> products are no attractive by the time they hit the market -> less revenues

Nothing really, its all good

Management and work culture sucks

upper management problem - no direction

don't expect guidance from management for growth beyond the current position; use the work/ live balance, down time and flexibility to develop your own plan of growth, execute it, and give management the option to get on board or out of the way.

Compensation not competitive, Need to revisit the pay strutted. Also may broaden her product line, and invest more on new area

It is missing diversification at all levels of employment

Was online, work from home, didn't get to work in office

no employ benefits or perk

Bad management that does not motivate employees

1. Poor management 2. Top level management lacks vision, frequent re-structuting. 3. Middle level management is even pathetic, they try to micro manage 4. immediate manager will never have time to talk to you about growth, sometimes even performance review is not done. 5. Some managers give the appraisal task to Sr. engineers in the team, this is very bad.

Process, process, process . . . a big beaurocracy. Jamming process down our throats regardless if the process proves inefficient. Managers are forced to rank employees, but these lists of ranked employees are then joined into different talent pools of similar jobs/responsibilities, and then some senior exec who knows nothing about you, re-ranks you to fit in some pre-conceived distribution.

salary is not competitive high levels don't have a long term view, move slowly

Pay, bonus, base pay, salary

bad management from this company compared with others

- Lack of job security - almost yearly layoffs in last 5 years

1. Compensation not the best in the industry. 2. No free food, shuttles/office cabs.

High volume of work. Meetings that can end at 8PM

Some internal tools lack comprehensive tutorials, making it challenging to adapt quickly to the use of tools one has no prior experience working with.

Managers are not promoted based on management abilities, but for personal reasons and preferences. Many of my colleagues were consistently disappointed with the quality of managers they had which resulted in regular turnover.

Sometime, it is hard to change from doing things the old way. But generally, people can be convinced.

lack of good leadership lack of knowledge pool , no good work No leadership . NO meaning of work culture

Sometimes long hours necessary, no full-time positions open. I was there when Hector Ruiz was in power, but now he's gone. Hopefully the company direction will really turn around now that Dirk is in charge. He always seemed like he had more of a clear direction, whereas Hector seemed to spend too much time trying to chase one thing, then jump off to chase another.

Salary: Peanuts Quality of work: Not so good

Saw literally thousands of layoffs over 3 year span.

Not I can think of

Never felt job was secure. (layoffs were common and a lot of time they were badly planned and done) Engineering often had leaks to the public, but management would never allow security to fix those leaks. They would rather not restrict engineering and have half the world know what they were doing before it was done. Quite a few of their money saving moves ended up costing more in the end.

not too many cons i like it

none visible right now, improving and going good

rewards from stock was low. Lack of new ideas. Some mistakes had to be repeated multiple times until finally solving. Salary raising was kind of slow. Office location was not very good.

1) Take time to provide resources.

Losing money quarter after quarter isn't exactly a morale booster. Career development isn't a priority (and in many parts of the company it's non-existent). Project planning and selection seems haphazard and more reactive than proactive, which can cause frequent project churn and frustration.

Increments are not up to the mark

No bonuses or raises in the last couple of years, and several other benefits have been cut. Basic compensation is probably competitive, but with an unstable job and non-performing stock and options, the overall benefit package is really uncompetitive. Also, there isn't enough career training or professional mentoring, and technical staff are not trained to be good managers. As a result, there is a lack of internal management talent. Also, several layoffs and poor product planning in the last couple of years have led to low employee morale.

- Uncompetitive pay compared to top companies.

Basically impossible to get promoted on your own merit- you have to play the game and make the right friends. This, of course, then means that you have a lot of people at the upper levels who aren't really smarter or better than their lower-down colleagues, but are adept at backstabbing. May just be a feature of the group I was in, though.

The leadership at AMD seem to have completely lost their direction and are more concerned with protecting what they seem to have rather then engage with the future.

- Lack of opportunities to grow - Leadership

I was in a small division. Avoid such groups

hard push, bad management, bad culture

Politics have often more impact than Engineering common sense. American honchos tend to look down on Canadians (and non-USA), as a lesser species. Company is struggling to survive and jobs can be moved to Asia anytime.

not good senior management at top

no problems, everything is thought out here

AMD is not profitable and they can't continue this way. We need to keep the people we have a keep compensating them well to remain competitive.

It is incredibly frustrating as it appears that no one is leading the ship. Strategic direction changes almost monthly, depending on which VP is on a war path. Operational policies are nonexistent, inconsistent and nonsensical. Midlevel management, for the most part are more political than market savvy and as such business decisions are focused on the need of the body politic rather than the need of the customer. Internal silos cause people to work at times at odds. There is a lack of coordination. Hector is completely disengaged.

Really long working hours during the week.

no technical questions for the entire interview