WD reviews

3.7

69% would recommend to a friend

(4,277 total reviews)
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Irving Tan

75% approve of CEO

63% positive business outlook

WD has an employee rating of 3.7 out of 5 stars, based on 4,277 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The WD employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

4K reviews
1.0
May 8, 2017

Sandisk QA

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

This is regarding Sandisk which got acquired by WD. The sandisk campus has nicely renovated buildings and facilities such as the onsite gym but that's about it. The product I was working on did not have any overlap with Western Digital so there wasn't really a risk of being laid off in my group.

Cons

Ask if your team has a lot of h1b's and contractors. If so, don't join if you have other job options because you might be joining my former sandisk QA group which was terrible. It was not worth the salary to stay there. Your career will stagnate for low pay and ill treatment and no recognition. I was given an increasing workload and responsibilities over a couple years but no raise. Whether before or after the acquisition my department has been consistently bad. On the surface the buildings are sleek and modern. However after a while it feels very cold and soulless like an asylum. Firstly 1) The working environment in my org was garbage. Everyone in my org was overworked. Meetings were often contentious where managers or coworkers openly chastise others. It seemed like this behavior was not discouraged but in fact tolerated. The only people to get raises or promotions were brusk dictator-like A-type jerks, or poor workaholics who spent every waking hour working their lives away. Secondly 2) the Pay was terrible because raises/promotions are so infrequent. So you will get saddled with more responsibilities but no raise to match it for years. Also, my team was almost all H1B's or contractors which gives management no reason to give decent compensation. How can you ask for a raise when you are surrounded by h1b's and contractors who are making peanuts? So the overall message was that the workers were expendable cheap labor. If you didn't like it, too bad, you could be replaced easily with an H1B or contractor. Thirdly 3) the deadlines are inflexible and unrealistic. Even if I had a valid reason for a delay, the upper management would act angry without first hearing the whole story, or ask rapid fire questions and keep interrupting me without much interest in my inputs or concerns. Not a good environment at all. Fourth-ly 4) Management micromanages like crazy and are obsessed with reports. You will spend as much time on JIRA or reporting as time spend on actual engineering work. There's a cumbersome JIRA system where you have to log how many hours per week you work on each thing and mark the progress of tens of JIRA items every week. And they have project managers hounding you to adhere to that every week. Not to mention weekly and monthly status reports that I don't think my direct manager even bothered to read even though I had to send it out. Don't work for sandisk QA if you have other options.

3.0
Oct 29, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Flexible hours Some cool on-site perks like table tennis, pool tables The site itself is well maintained, despite being old. Nice for walks, etc. Close to shopping, restaurants, bowling alley, etc. Management is typically not overbearing Friendly coworkers. Most who stay at WD say they stay for the people, not the job (the second part belongs in cons)

Cons

As the title mentions, be careful not to get stuck here. With certain positions, your technical expertise will become hard disk drives (HDDs). The problem with that is that you will learn company specific tools that pretty much NO other company will care about. So what if you are an expert in internal tools? Little to none of them are used elsewhere. So be careful not to get stuck there, unless that is in fact what you enjoy doing. Another major con is that there are layoffs that have been occurring roughly every 3 months over the last 2 years. Very demoralizing. Very few organized activities or employee incentives, so the morale is VERY poor. This may change in the future, but it's not happening anytime soon. These layoffs are primarily due to the integration of WD with SanDisk and HGST, which were purchased recently. Good business move, but it has really devastated the employees that are left Cafeteria is just ok in quality, and VERY over priced. It's quite impressive really that they get away with it. Pay is not competitive during quarters where WD doesn't pay out incentives above 100%, which happened a lot lately Engineering day, an annual employee appreciation event, has been cancelled for the last 2 years. Apparently that can't be afforded, but multi-BILLION dollar purchases can be

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