Company on the rise, and bringing employees with it - Senior Test Engineer AMD Employee Review

5.0
Jan 10, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Started as a contractor, good base pay but with no benefits that aren't legally required (unlike past companies where the benefits were similar but with poor base pay as well). With the current hiring model my team uses means anyone they want to keep often becomes permanent within 2 years of contracting. I'm now permanent, great usual corporate benefits, far higher than average pay for QA (again based on past experience with other companies), and I'm enjoying the work environment. Despite my job requiring at least some hands-on work with hardware, my team found a way for us to minimize our exposure to each other during the pandemic. We all work for home, except for one person who handles hardware changes. We rotate that responsibility daily. Work is flexible, getting time off is a matter of informing rather than requesting, and taking that time is highly encouraged. Very easy to set boundaries between work and home life if you have the desire to do so. Company is growing fast, hiring and promoting often. Lots of room to make a mark and maybe even create a new role for yourself if you see something they organization is missing that you can provide. Lots of opportunities to provide your input, be heard, and make an impact that you can see and be rewarded for.

Cons

Workload can be a lot, and deadlines can be tight, leading to crunch time. These crunch times range from 1 week to a few months (not common, just a rough transition into a new project). The company will ask for long hours and weekends, and it's up to you say no if you aren't comfortable with it or just burned out. I've found they're very respectful of their employee's declining overtime. and they don't really pry for personal reasons. The rapid growth of the company comes with the downside that we are gaining new business faster than we can build your infrastructure (new-hires, new teams, scaling up etc...). Can kind of feel like you're working in a start-up that just made it big, even though your in a large and established corporation. They are working on resolving this problem though.

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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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