Applied Materials reviews

While the pay was great, employees were forced to take a 5% pay cut. Upper Management took a 10% pay cut, but because the company made it to their profitability goal, all the VPs and such got HUGE bonuses compared to their pay cut. Employees got shafted on that one. While there were a lot of intelligent people with great ideas, management rarely listened to them (until they hired a consultant who told them the same thing). If you did good work, you got pigeonholed doing it and they kept piling more work on fromt he folks who were laid-off. So eventually people got burned out because they were doing 3X the work (or more) than they were getting paid for. Sadly, their heroic efforts were rewarded with "Well, you got a job."

The cyclical nature of the industry leads to a very stressful life at AMAT. Way too many layoffs while holding onto a huge amount of cash on hand which was meant to "get the company through rough times". The cash reserves seemed to never get touched. Even during periods of layoffs (3-6 layoffs every two years), cash was added to the reserves. Management had their "favorite sons" which could do no wrong and were given all the "fun" assignments. Employees were frequently "pigeon holed" in positions they were good at even if they were not happy there. Work that nobody wanted to do was usually pushed completely onto one person.