Incompetence, Politics, and Platitudes in Place of Engineering
Pros
- Colleagues are kind, responsive, and engaged - The core technology is good - RDU is a good place to live - Most sensible engineers there know Wolfpseed is a joke - Severance was generous
Cons
- Quality is a gesture, not a practice - Health insurance is abysmal - No longer provide employees stock incentives - They hemorrhage $200M-$300M a quarter, but think engineers taking their office trash out will save them $1M a year - Leadership has no idea what they are doing and will forgo tool purchases that would make a difference and instead force human labor to replace tool sets despite monthly-weekly excursions caused by human error - Leadership thinks plans they made 5 years ago are still valid despite i) revenue dropping by 50% in that same time-frame and ii) the company going through bankruptcy as a result of these plans - Processes are so jumbled and disorganized that a majority of their losses are attributable to parts just getting lost, miss-placed, or miss-processed - Middle managers are self-seeking without any real focus on true issues - they chase yield gains by finding yield in the garbage bin (claiming defects like finger prints are benign) and expect lower-level engineers to fix major issues by tweaks rather than process chain overhauls and pushing leaders to invest in better practices. - Refusal to accept glaring issues as needing resolution as it may upset higher ups who have oversaw said issues for past 5-10 years - Most engineers will openly say that the only way to fix Wolfpseed is to burn it down and start from scratch - Experience at Wolfspeed is considered a positive inside the company, but, speak to semiconductor engineers in the area and they consider the company a practitioner of bad habits and dumb mistakes.
