GlobalFoundries reviews

It's been said you can predict a company's success based on their first 10 employees. If that's true, you can expect GLOBALFOUNDRIES to be an absolute failure. They hired too many managers in too short a time frame (2009 to 2011), and they attracted too many failures and cast-aways from other companies. It's the Island of Misfit Managers. Some of these early joiners were technicians in their previous jobs, with 2 year degrees, and just got lucky applying to GF when they were looking to fill a bunch of director level jobs, and section manager jobs, etc... While I was there, I made a game with myself of trying to guess why each manager didn't succeed at his previous job. (I don't know what made ATIC think it would be easy to put together a core team so rapidly.) The end result is that these people are scared. They're scared of every new person they hire, because they're afraid he or she will out-shine them, and expose their incompetence. Thus, you may never have met your boss's boss. There is no big engineering meeting where all engineers are invited, and everyone has a chance to shine in front of the main manager of your department. Nothing that could possibly make you look better than your boss is ever allowed. If you're smart and your boss knows it, you'll get even less visibility, and a lot of tedious projects meant to keep you in the lab, and away from any meetings where decisions are made. Less experienced people are treated better than more experienced people, because less experienced people are less threatening. If you are eager for advanced training, but you were hired at a relatively low rank, forget about it. You won't get it. Being hired at a low rank is the best leverage these incompetent managers have against you, and they'll never let go of it, because they know they have nothing else. In the 4 years I was there, I only knew of one person ever getting promoted, and it was only because they hired him at least 2 levels below where he should have been, and they knew they'd lose him if they didn't at least partially correct their initial mistake. The big lie that management likes to repeat is the idea that GF is "data driven", when the precise opposite is true. It's driven purely by rank. There isn't any way to prove yourself with the "data", because there is no good data to point to. If both choice A and choice B result in no measurable improvement to the product, then the choice that is made depends entirely on the rank of the person choosing. Not only that, a lot of choices are made for political reasons, and not engineering reasons, and if they keep you as a political outsider, you'll never know what those political reasons are. It may be that one manager is deliberately trying to waste company time or money, because he sees an opportunity to make another manager look bad, etc... As the company continues to fail to meet any of its goals, reorganizations appear out of nowhere, new business models appear out of nowhere, and the message from the top gets less and less believable, and your job becomes more and more of a drudgery. At the ground level, it's all about blame game, and hypocritical outrage. Low level managers try to blame the direct reports of other low level managers, trying to make it seem like they care more about the company than anyone else, but they all go home at 5 o'clock anyway. They know the company can't be successful, but they torture anyone they outrank with phony outrage and pointless projects, which they know cannot possibly bear fruit.

The word I would use to describe my time at Globalfoundries is "chaotic". I joined fresh out of college and even with my little experience was able to tell that things were not running nearly as smoothly as they could. They struggled to establish a work culture that they wanted to stick to, so there were lots of non-cohesive attitudes. There were very aggressive targets set for the business, and employees worked extremely hard (overtime, holidays, etc) to meet these goals, but this resulted only in further pushing from management and unfortunately not a lot of recognition. Many of the employees are burnt out, especially the few really good ones that eventually wind up leaving or transferring departments in hopes of better compensation or promotion. I think they have been making progress over the past few years, but it has been slow and too many mistakes. During my time there (left in 2014) I would rate management as poor overall. Salary was alright, but there was not a good or clear method for self-progression and promotions or salary bumps. Benefits package was pretty good, and time off was decent... however with the extreme pressure to work constantly it felt frowned upon to take a day off. I almost always expected calls when I was off work. Hopefully they have streamlined some of their processes by now.