The gap between ideals and reality at On Semiconductor is big and it is getting worse. It is covered to some degree by a rising stock price and its recent acquisitions, but the cancer is still there.
A claim is that On Semiconductor’s core values are “initiative, respect, and integrity.”
In terms of initiative, there is no system development life cycle that protects software inventory and facilitates quality and time to market. Agile doesn’t exist and nor does service-oriented architecture in any meaningful sense.
What am to make of a team where there are no team meetings, no project plans, no approved requirements, little or inadequate test plans or data, no quality control, no six sigma, and where the loudest, most conservative, and most junior voices define on-the-fly software development?
The result is that teams around the clock try to support an ancient, organically developed, brittle, obsolete system that throws repetitious software failures every day. The entire SDLC process is broken. It is responsible for the endless firefighting and routine deployment and execution failures far in excess of what is typical of organizations of that size. The silos at On Semiconductor are such that there is poor communication and where collaboration is defined by e-mails rather than through face to face interactions. What could take days elsewhere to develop takes weeks or months at On Semiconductor.
And no one who has authority cares or knows what to do if they do care.
In terms of respect and integrity, what am I to make of the dishonesty, duplicity, and vileness that infects parts of On Semiconductor? The overall atmosphere approached in my view the legal definition of a hostile workplace. Because of the offshoring and the redundancy of roles in the wake of acquisition integration, some people are afraid and that fear brings out a certain element of ruthlessness from those who are insecure about their long term prospects. While that is an explanation, it does not justify or mitigate the tendency to unethical behavior at On Semiconductor.
The problems at On Semiconductor are real and they are serious.
Consider yourself warned.
There is the proverb that “fish stinks from the head first.” There is little leadership at the departmental level. To the contrary, there a strong “that’s the way we’ve always done things” mentality because of its bottom up organizational and architectural tendencies.
Accordingly, I’m giving senior management and the CEO the lowest possible rating to encourage them to come to grips with these fundamental problems. While I’m no longer an employee, I am a shareholder, and I have an interest in seeing On Semiconductor succeed in spite of itself.
