Shooting itself on the foot - SMTS Design Engineer AMD Employee Review

2.0
Mar 7, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

-Like many reviews before point out, there is a good life-work balance. Be careful though because many individuals interpreted the very same thing in a more negative way (lack of ambition, schedules are rarely observed, ...). -There is a very positive consequence of not being a successful company: people tend to be more grounded than in other tech companies. The constant chaos results in workers that understand what the important things in life really are, and understand that most of them happen outside of the workplace. -Strangely enough, you can get promoted fairly quickly (by elimination, everyone leaves but you), which may help out when you move to the next job

Cons

-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for AMD to come up with good products considering the amount of good people who left, and the fact that they have been replaced by so-so engineers since top talent will land elsewhere -Morale is low.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

Explore other reviews about AMD

5.0
Jul 24, 2026
Anonymous intern
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Flexibility with remote work and opportunities for ownership

Cons

Parts of the company are more mature than others

1.0
Jul 18, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Stocks went up 5x in the last year

Cons

Since I joined, I realized the teams in software engineering practices has always been sub par compared to the other companies who built competitive tools. There is a huge gap in our hardware expertise vs software development maturity. Excessively complex architectural decisions and poor decisioning only ended up in burning more cash each year, and this is likely due to engineers with long tenures within the company siloed with their ideas. Furthermore, there is a disconnect in management’s approach to evaluating engineering success. The current focus on optics rather than tangible technical metrics has demoralized the team, leading to high turnover risk. I am also concerned that our current reward structure incentivizes short-term 'churn'—building unnecessary features only to 'optimize' them later—rather than sustainable development. Finally, from an operational standpoint, I noticed the cloud infrastructure spending in some teams were substantially higher than acceptable ; the ROI is not currently justifying the scale of our investment. Culture is a joke. Not surprised since this is a 50 year old company with a particular ethnicity’s dominance everywhere although they claim they are culturally diverse, this only retards your growth within the company.

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